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STUDIES IN POETRY 



STUDIES IN POETRY 

CRITICAL, ANALYTICAL, 
INTERPRET A TIVE 



BY 

THOMAS O'HAGAN, M.A., Ph.D. 



BOSTON 

MARLIER, CALLANAN, & COMPANY 

1900 

u- 



9541 



Library «f C*> -"•-til 
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JUN 2 



second copy. 

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ORDER DIVISION, 



JUN S3 1 9 00 

Copyright, 1900, 

Br £f 6 s 9°if GAN 



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TO ALL WHO DREAM AND BUILD AND DWELL IN THE 
ENCHANTED REALMS OF POESY 



&fjfe Volume ts htscrtbetr &g 

The Author. 



THE STUDY OF POETKY 

Aet has its root in the spiritual, and poetry, which 
is in many ways the greatest of the arts, cannot 
be properly studied or interpreted save through 
the spiritual. 

Now, as the first function of any piece of art is 
to give delight in some form, the reader of poetry 
must seek for this delight and joy, which should 
flow from every true poem. 

The primary and chief purpose in the study of 
poetry is not discipline and instruction, but exalta- 
tion and inspiration, — the liberation of the im- 
agination and enrichment of the spirit. 

For poetry, which is the flowering of the soul, 
the golden ear of the century, the summit of 
thought, is something more than thought. It is, 
as Dr. Hamilton Mabie says, " thought plus the 
personality of a man of genius." 

The insulated intellect cannot get the best out 
of a poem, for poetry appeals to the whole man as 
a thinking, rational, moral, and spiritual being. 



THE STUDY OF POETRY 

All poetry, too, is written to be read, to be 
voiced, and only through vocal interpretation can 
the indefinite element in a poem be reached. 

Nor should any analytical exegesis be entered 
upon till the poem as a work of art, as an artistic 
unit, has impressed itself upon the mind and soul. 

Let both teacher and student have a care, too, 
that they pause not at the threshold of the temple 
of poetry, lest they catch not a vision of the glory 
upon the altar within ! 

T. O'H. 

Toronto, Canada, May 1, 1900. 



CONTENTS. 



Page 

Tennyson's "In Memoriam " 1 

Browning's "A Death in the Desert'' ... 24 

Mrs. Browning's " Sonnets from the Portu- 
guese " 38 

Wordsworth's Ode "On Intimations of Immor- 
tality" 51 

Coleridge's " Ancient Mariner " 70 

Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound" 81 

Keats's "Eve of St. Agnes" 92 

Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" . . 1(32 



STUDIES IN POETRY 



TENNYSON'S "IN MEMORIAM" 

Like Dante's " Divina Commedia " and Goethe's 
" Faust," Tennyson's " In Memoriam " is a world- 
poem. It is an autobiographic docu- The place of 

ment of the nineteenth century, mirror- ttJn Memori- 

. am" in the 

ing its deepest life and summing up Literattire of 

its most subtle and complex thought. 
Like every great poem, too, it is a chapter in the 
spiritual history of the race — a revelation of 
what is in the heart of man, in his contact with 
the world. Poetry which has its root in the spir- 
itual universalizes and eternalizes. It deals with 
the permanent and absolute in man — with that 
which is independent of both time and place. " In 
Memoriam " is a lyrical drama of the soul, the 
record of a great moral and intellectual conflict, 
" the poetical expression of a soul's moral and in- 
tellectual growth through sorrow, and through 
strife with the difficulties that beset the truths 
and mysteries of religion." 

1 



2 STUDIES IN POETRY 

If " In Memoriam " did naught but embalm a 
personal sorrow, it would not be the great art- 
product that it is. Not until the genesis of its 
particular sorrow swells out into the universal, 
does the deep significance of this great poem lay 
hold of us ; then indeed we realize that " In 
Memoriam " is a world-poem, that it touches the 
eternal in man, that within this great Cathedral 
of sorrow we may each and all find an oratory or 
chapel, — an altar decked with the flowers of our 
own particular grief. 

The proper approach to the study and interpre- 
tation of a poem is always of paramount value to 
The Approach a student. Let us see, therefore, what 
to its study, should be our approach to a clear, care- 
ful, and sympathetic interpretation of this great 
masterpiece. Just here let it be remembered at 
the outset that the charm of " In Memoriam " re- 
sides in the poetry and not in the thought ; that, as 
Dr. Hamilton Mabie says, it issues out of the total- 
ity of the poem, and not out of any single element. 
" In Memoriam " should, then, be studied first 
as a work of art. When the complete beauty and 
charm of the poem have impressed themselves, it 
is time to seek for the meaning of the poem, — to 
probe its depth and get at its secret. Little by 
little through a study of its integral parts, lyric 
by lyric, the student will be led to observe the 



"IN MEMORIAM" 3 

noble unity of the whole poem. He will observe, 
too, how the lyrics or sections are related to each 
other, grow out of each other, and sometimes are a 
complement of each other. Before studying each 
lyric separately and seeking out its central idea, 
the question of the germ-thought or poetic moment 
of the poem should also first receive attention, 
for this germ-thought has not a little to do in the 
fashioning, moulding, and coloring of the whole 
poem — it is this germ-thought which, so to speak, 
holds the poem in its moral orbit. What stanza 
or stanzas, then, contain the germ-thought of " In 
Memoriam " ? Is not the nucleus of thought 
around which the whole poem crystallizes to be 
found in these well known and oft-quoted lines ? — 

" This truth came borne with bier and pall, 
I felt it when I sorrow'd most, 
'Tis better to have loved and lost 
Than never to have loved at all." 

The question as to how much Tennyson is 
indebted in the construction of " In Memoriam " to 
the great masters who preceded him, 
can never be fully ascertained. There Technique 
is no doubt, as Brother Azarias points ofthePoem - 
out, that the author had before his mind, as he 
wrote, the sonnets and odes of Petrarch on the 
death of Laura, Shakespeare's sonnets, and Shelley's 
** Adonais." Although Tennyson tells us himself. 



4 STUDIES IN POETRY 

in speaking of "In Memoriam," " the general way 
of its being written was so queer that if there were 
a blank space I would put in a poem," that he 
formulated at the outset the plan which shines 
through his work as an organic whole seems, 
nevertheless, more than probable. The fact that 
the author, according to his own words, added a 
lyric here and a lyric there does not nullify this 
probability. 

Now, as to the stanza emplo) r ed in "In Memo- 
nam," a very interesting study of rhyme effect is 
afforded through its examination. Did Tennyson 
borrow this form of stanza from Lord Herbert of 
Cherbury, Ben Jonson, or Dante Gabriel Rossetti ? 
for all three had employed it before Tennyson had 
put his hand to the " In Memoriam." We believe 
a careful study of the " In Memoriam " stanza form 
will convince the reader or student that, while not 
original, it became in the author's hands a poetic 
necessity — an outcome of the moulding power 
or divine energy of inspiration. It will be noticed, 
too, how admirably adapted the form of this 
stanza is, with its second and third verses closely 
braced, and the terminal rhyme emphasis of the 
stanza reduced, for bearing along unchecked the 
flow of spiritualized sorrow, thus imparting to 
the poem throughout a true elegiac tone. 

Where the stanzas admit of a change in the 



"IN MEMORIAM" 5 

rhyme-scheme without affecting the sense, let the 
student convert them into alternate rhymes and 
notice how this transposition will change the whole 
tone of the poem. There is atmosphere in a poem 
as well as in a painting, and were the alternate 
rhyme-scheme to be introduced in this atmosphere 
it would not serve so well to conduct the in- 
definitely spiritual element which constitutes the 
essential life of this poem. A fine example of the 
peculiar adaptedness of the stanza employed in " In 
Memoriam " to, the continuous flow of thought 
is to be found in the eighty-sixth section. It is 
said to have been a favorite lyric of Tennyson's. 
Note how continuous and even is the movement 
of the verse, how the sense is suspended till the 
close, and what a charm there is in the reposeful 
ending on the final word " Peace " : 

" Sweet after showers, ambrosial air, 

That rollest from the gorgeous gloom 
Of evening over brake and bloom 
And meadow, slowly breathing bare 

" The round of space, and rapt below 
Thro* all the dewy-tassell'd wood, 
And shadowing down the horned flood 
In ripples, fan my brows and blow 

"The fever from my cheek, and sigh 

The full new life that feeds thy breath 
Throughout my frame, till Doubt and Death 
111 brethren, let the fancy fly 



6 STUDIES IN POETRY 

" From belt to belt of crimson seas, 
On leagues of odour, streaming far 
To where, in yonder orient star, 
A hundred spirits whisper ' Peace.' " 

It is customary on the part of some critics to 
make a general onslaught on "In Memoriam" 

catholic As- an( ^ c h ar g e ** with being a poem of 
pectsof"in scepticism. It is indeed quite easy to 

Memoriam.' ■ 5 _ _ * . . * 

make such a charge, but it is much 
more difficult to convict it from its own teachings. 
" In Memoriam " is not a poem of scepticism, but 
the record of a soul growing through doubt into 
faith. Not only is " In Memoriam " not a poem 
of scepticism, but there is much in its teachings 
that coincides with Catholic dogma. 

The very opening invocation in the prologue to 
the poem, written by the poet in 1849, testifies to 
Tennyson's faith in the Divinity of Christ and the 
mysteries of God : 

" Strong Son of .God, immortal Love, 

Whom we, that have not seen thy face, 
By faith, and faith alone embrace, 
Believing where we cannot prove." 

In the third stanza he says : — 

" Thou madest man, he knows not why." 

Here the poet departs from Catholic teaching, 
else what is the meaning of the Incarnation of the 



"IN MEMORIAM" 7 

" Son of God " and nineteen centuries of light of 
his divine gospel? Yet does not the poet himself 
tell us in the very same lyric why man was 
created ? — 

" Our wills are ours, we know not how ; 
Our wills are ours, to make them thine." 

In the fourth stanza of the same prologue, ad- 
dressing the " Son of God," the poet says : 

" Thou seemest human and divine 

The highest, holiest manhood, thou." 

This would, at first reading, appear to imply a 
doubt as to the divinity of Christ, but if a care- 
ful and an extended study be made of the mean- 
ing which Tennyson attaches to the word seem, it 
will be found that no such meaning can be or 
should be read out of this line ; for the poet uses 
the word seem here, not in the sense of appearing 
to be what a thing is not, but in the sense of 
appearing to be what it is. 

In the third last stanza of the prologue and in 
the first stanza of the thirty-third section, note the 
use attached to the word seem : 

" Forgive what seerrCd my sin in me ; 
What seem'd my worth since I began. 

O Thou that after toil and storm 

Mayst seem to have reached a purer air." 



8 STUDIES IN POETRY 

How very close to Catholic doctrine, too, is 
Tennyson's invocation of the departed in sections 
ninety-three and ninety-four : 

" I shall not see thee. Dare I say 
Xo spirit ever brake the band 
That stays him from the native land 
Where first he walk'd when claspt in clay ? 

" O, therefore from thy sightless range 
With gods in nnconjectnred bliss, 
O, from the distance of the abyss 
Of tenfold-complicated change, 

"Descend, and touch, and enter; hear 

The wish too strong for words to name ; 
That in this blindness of the frame 
My ghost may feel that thine is near. 

" How pure at heart and sound in head, 
With what divine affections bold 
Should be the man whose thought would hold 
An hour's communion with the dead." 

With Tennyson, prayer is the truest religion. 
This is set forth in the thirty-second and thirty- 
third sections : 

" Thrice blest whose lives are faithful prayers, 
Whose loves in higher love endure ; 
What souls possess themselves so pure, 
Or is there blessedness like theirs ? " 



"IN MEMORIAM" 9 

1 ' Leave thou thy sister when she prays, 
Her early Heaven, her happy views ; 
Nor thou with shadow' d hint confuse 
A life that leads melodious lays." 

Again, take sections one hundred and twenty- 
three and one hundred and twenty-four and com- 
pare them with Cardinal Newman's beautiful 
passage in the " Apologia, "page 377, and note how 
parallel they are in line of argument in their 
proof of the existence of a God. Both Newman 
and Tennyson consider that the voice of con- 
science and the feelings of the heart are much 
more conclusive of the existence of a God than 
any arguments that are discoverable in the works 
of nature. Tennyson's lines are : 

" There rolls the deep where grew the tree, 
O Earth, what changes hast thou seen ! 
There where the long street roars, hath been 
The stillness of the central sea. 

" The hills are shadows, and they flow 

From form to form, and nothing stands ; 
They melt like mist, the solid lands, 
Like clouds they shape themselves and go. 

" But in my spirit will I dwell 

And dream my dream, and hold it true ; 
For though my lips may breathe adieu 
I cannot think the thing farewell. 



10 STUDIES IN POETRY 

" If e'er when faith had f all'n asleep, 
I heard a voice ' believe no more ' 
And heard an ever breaking shore 
That tumbled in the Godless deep ; 

" A warmth within the breast would melt 

The freezing reason's colder part, 

And like a man in wrath the heart 

Stood up and answered ' I have felt.' " 

Newman tells us, " Were it not for this voice 
speaking so clearly in my conscience and my 
heart, I should be an atheist or a pantheist or a 
polytheist when I looked into the world. ... I 
am far from denying the real force of the argu- 
ments in proof of a God drawn from the general 
facts of human society; but these do not warm 
me or enlighten me ; they do not take away the 
winter of my desolation or make the buds unfold 
and the leaves grow within me and my moral 
being rejoice." 

Who has ever rebutted in verse more ably than 
Tennyson has in the "In Memoriam " the arguments 
adduced by infidels in support of their unbelief ? — 
as witness the following sections of the poem : The 
Fates not blind, in; Life shall be for evermore, 
xxxiv; If Death were death, love would not be 
true love, xxxv; Individuality defies the tomb, 
XL vi; Immortality, liv and lv; Doubt issuing 
in belief, xcv; Knowledge without wisdom, cxiii; 



"IN MEMORIAM" 11 

Progress, cxvii; We are not all matter, cxix; 
and The course of human things, cxxvu. 

There is one stanza in section ninety-six which 
is often quoted by those who charge " In Memo- 
riam " with being a poem of scepticism, and declare 
its ethical teaching to be dangerous, that demands 
our attention at this point for a moment. Here is 
the oft cited quatrain : 

11 Perplext in faith but pure in deeds, 
At last he beat his music out. 
There lives more faith in honest doubt, 
Believe me, than in half the creeds ! " 

It should be remembered, that faith, which has 
held conflict with doubt throughout the whole 
development and progress of the poem, has not 
gained supremacy at this point, and does not gain 
full supremacy till the close of the poem, — doubt 
pressing in many instances, as here, hard upon the 
shield of faith. It is easy to single out stanzas in 
"In Memoriam" wherein doubt is the flowering 
of sorrow not yet sanctified, and faith comes out of 
the conflict apparently maimed ; and so has it often 
been in conflicts in the world. Faith appears to 
suffer for the time, but ever comes out triumphant 
at the close. 

" In Memoriam " is a history of the genesis of a 
great sorrow, and the story of a heart girt around, 



12 STUDIES IN POETRY 

encompassed, by the perplexing problems of life, 
death, and the mystery of hereafter. Never be- 

' , fore was there such a beautiful temple 
Biographical r 

and Auto- of song erected to the memory of man, 
iograp c . an( j Arthur Hallam may indeed rest 
secure within its transepts, assured of the undying 
light of immortality. " In Memoriam " is both bio- 
graphical and autobiographical. It deals with the 
character, friendship, and memory of one of the 
most gifted and perfect young men who have ever 
lived in the tide of times. It is autobiographical 
in so far as it records the life history of the* 
author himself through the various phases of sor- 
row which mark the progress of the poem. 

While reading "In Memoriam" once to Mr. 
James Knowles, Tennyson thus commented on 
the poem as to its personal and impersonal char- 
acter : 

" It is rather the cry of the whole human race 
than mine. In the poem altogether, private grief 
swells out into thought of and hope for the whole 
world. It begins with a funeral and ends with a 
marriage ; begins with death and ends in promise 
of a new life, — a sort of Divine Comedy, cheerful 
at the close. It is a very impersonal poem as 
well as personal. There is more about myself in 
'Ulysses,' which was written under the sense of 
loss, and that all had gone by, but that still life 



"IN MEMORIAM" 13 

mast be fought out to the end. It was more 
written with the feeling of his loss upon me 
than many poems in ' In Memoriam.' ... It 's too 
hopeful, this poem, more than I am myself. . . .The 
general way of its being written was so queer that 
if there were a blank space I would put in a poem. 
... I think of adding another to it, a speculative 
one, bringing. out the thoughts of the Higher Pan- 
theism and showing that all the arguments are 
about as good on one side as the other, and thus 
throw man back more on the primitive impulses 
and feelings." 

These three epochs of grief belong to the stages 
in the development of every true sorrow, and if 
we examine the genesis or develop- 
ment of the sorrow in " In Memoriam," f Grief ^Grief 

from sensuous sorrow at the outset to £ e "j | f*} et . 

Reflected on ; 

sanctified sorrow at the close, it will Grief Trans- 
be found that these three forms of 
grief correspond very distinctly with the three 
periods in the life of the poem. From section one 
to section seventy-one inclusive, we have grief 
felt : vi- viii, grief and sense ; ix-xxi, grief and 
imagination; xxn-xxvn, grief and thought; 
xxvm-xxxvii, grief in the atmosphere of faith. 
Change here of key from faith to hope : xxxvni- 
xlix, grief and hope ; l-lviii, grief in faith and 
hope united ; lix-lxv, grief and love ; lxvi- 



14 STUDIES IN POETRY 

lxxi, grief in the region beyond consciousness. 
From lxxii to xcvii, we have grief reflected on : 
lxxii-lxxvii, the world's loss in him estimated; 
lxxviii-lxxxiii, my own loss in him estimated ; 
lxxxiv-lxxxviii, memories linked with hopes; 
lxxxix-xcvii, our communion an intellectual 
one. From xcvin to cxxxi, we have grief trans- 
formed : xcviii-cvi, to heighten the contrast, 
the poet allows himself to be carried back by 
associations of time and by the severing of associa- 
tions of place to renewed freshness of grief, but 
shakes off this feeling and loses it in the world's 
hope ; cvn-cxv, the fruit of sorrow the deathless 
ideal; cxvi-cxxv, grief, too, has its spring of 
transformation ; cxxvi-cxxxi, the victory of love. 
Let there be added here the " nine natural groups 
or divisions " of the poem as given to Mr. Knowles 
by Tennyson himself: From I to Yin; from ix 
to xx ; from xxi to xxvii ; from xxvin to xlix ; 
from L to lviii; from Lix to LXI; from lxii 
to xcvin; from xcix to cm and from civ to 

CXXXI. 

When Tennyson hears of Arthur's death he is 
overwhelmed with grief. His sorrow drowns the 
The Anniver- world. Nature seems purposeless — 
tor S H alim's " A hoUow form with empty hands." 
Death. The darkness of his heart he finds 

symbolized in the sullen changeless yew tree. 



"IN MEMORIAM" 15 

44 And gazing on thee, sullen tree, 

Sick for thy stubborn hardihood, 
I seem to fail from out my blood, 
And grow incorporate into thee." 

He regards sorrow as a " cruel fellowship," rails 
against it, and repels the trite condolence that loss 
is common to the race. Even sleep, the "balm of 
hurt minds," gives way and in the gray dawn of 
morning he visits the house of Hallam on Wimpole 
street. 

" Dark house, by which once more I stand, 
Here in the long unlovely street. 
Doors, where my heart was used to beat 
So quickly, waiting for a hand. 

" A hand that can be clasped no more, — 
Behold me, for I cannot sleep, 
And like a guilty thing I creep 
At earliest morning to the door." 

At the end of a year, as the first anniversary of 
Arthur's death comes around (section lxxii), 
there is little abatement in his sorrow. His world 
seems yet dominated by sorrow, and nature shares 
this influence. He does not rail against nature — 

". . . no, nor death; 
For nothing is that errs from law." 

When the next anniversary dawns (Sept. 15, 
1836) (section xcix), the tone is changed, the 



16 STUDIES IN POETRY 

birds are singing, the meadows breathe softly of 
the past, and the woodlands are holy to the dead. 
But the greatest change is that the transformation 
in Tennyson's sorrow has brought him to think 
less of his own* pain, and more of the pain of man- 
kind. 

When the bells of the first Christmas Eve ring 
out peace and good-will (section xxvni), he re- 

,m. ^ members that he had almost wished to 

The Three 

Christmas- die in his grief before he heard them, 
but they control his spirit with a touch 
of joy. Faith brings hope and consolation; and 
here we have the first prophecy of the soul's tri- 
umph over sorrow, — the first budding and blos- 
soming of hope : 

" Our voices took a higher range ; 

Once more we sang : ' They do not die, 
Nor lose their mortal sympathy, 
Nor change to us, although they change. 

" ' Rise, happy morn, rise, holy morn, 

Draw forth the cheerful day from night : 
O Father, touch the east, and light 
The light that shone when Hope was born.' " 

The anniversary of the second Christmas is not 
so sad as the first. The snow is silent and the day 
calm. A sense of loss broods over nature, but 



"IN MEMORIAM" 17 

sorrow within his heart, now calm, is reflected in 
peace around him : 

" last regret, Regret can die ! " 

Not yet has his grief passed out of the personal 
into the universal, nor has the poet escaped from 
himself. His half-intellectual analysis of doubts, 
and the replies of the understanding to them have 
as yet brought his soul no victory. There has 
been a lull in his sorrow, but no real transforma- 
tion. 

The third Christmastide (1837) beholds a change 
in everything (section civ.). Tennyson has moved 
from Lincolnshire, and the change from the old 
home for another has broken, like the growth of 
time,, the bond of dying use. 

« 
" No more shall wayward grief abuse 

The genial hour with mask and mime ; 
For change of place, Hke growth of time, 
Has broke the bond of dying use. 

" Be neither song, nor game, nor feast ; 

Nor harp be toueh'd, nor flute be blown ; 
No dance, no motion, save alone 
What lightens in the lucid east 

" Of rising worlds by yonder wood. 

Long sleeps the summer in the seed ; 
Run out your measured arcs, and lead 
The closing cycle rich in good." 



18 STUDIES IN POETRY 

With the dawn of the new year (section cvi), 
his personal sorrow disappears. His heart is full 
of mankind, and his own victory over sorrow has 
taught him the victory over sorrow that awaits the 
race. 

The thirty-eighth section commemorates the first 
The coming of springtide (in 1834), six months after 
springtides. Arthur's death. Here, though the poet 
has some comfort, he has no delight : 

" No joy the blowing season gives, 
The herald melodies of spring, 
But in the songs I love to sing 
A doubtful gleam of solace lives." 

The spring of 1835 brings more cheerfulness. 
Sorrow has not yet entirely departed, but already 
the poet feels in his soul the harbinger of a spir- 
itual spring, when he shall rise above his pall of 
sorrow : 

" Bring orchis, bring the foxglove spire, 

And flood a fresher throat with song." 

In the third springtide (sections cxv, cxvi), re- 
gret has wholly died out. The re-orient life of the 
world is the symbol of the departure of a wintry 
grief that looks to a friendship that is to be. 

We have thus far traced the genesis and trans- 
formation of sorrow through the anniversaries of 



"IN MEMORIAM" 19 

Arthur's death, the three Christmastides and the 
three springtides. The contrasts that mark these 
periods of grief are enough to indicate clearly 
" that ' In Memoriam ' is the history of a soul in 
progress from darkness to light ; from the selfish- 
ness to the unselfishness of sorrow ; from despair of 
God and man to faith in both ; and, as a personal 
matter, from the thought that friendship was utterly 
lost in death to the thought that friendship was 
gained through death at a higher level of love and 
with a deeper union." 

No person can read the " In Memoriam " without 
feeling the delight imparted by its vital beauty. 
So many of its lyrics are as polished as some of the 
the bosom of a star, so many deep-set SXJgj&tf- 
with meaning and freighted with sig- icant Lyrics, 
nificance, that the making of a choice is beset with 
embarrassment. Here are five stanzas (section 
XI.) which sound like one long rippling swell of 
Cathedral music : 

" Calm is the morn without a sound, 
Calm as to suit a calmer grief, 
And only thro' the faded leaf 
The chestnut pattering to the ground : 

" Calm and deep peace on this high wold, 1 
And on these dews that drench the furze, 
And all the silvery gossamers 
That twinkle into green and gold : 



20 STUDIP;S IN POETRY 

" Calm and still light on yon great plain 

That sweeps, with all its autumn bowers, 
And crowded farms and lessening towers, 
To mingle with the bounding main : 

" Calm and deep peace in this wide air, 
These leaves that redden to the fall : 
And in my heart, if calm at all, 
If any calm, a calm despair : 

ce Calm on the seas, and silver sleep, 

And waves that sway themselves in rest. 
And dead calm in that noble breast 
Which heaves but with the heaving deep." 

Again, the lyric which makes up the sixty-fourth 
section is full of beauty, strength, and significance : 

" Dost thou look back on what hath been, 
As some divinely gifted man, 
Whose life in low estate began, 
And on a simple village green ; 

" Who breaks his birth's invidious bar, 
And grasps the skirts of happy chance, 
And breasts the blows of circumstance, 
And grapples with his evil star ; 

"Who makes by force his merit known, 
And lives to clutch the golden keys, 
To mould a mighty state's decrees, 
And shape the whisper of the throne ; 



"IN MEMORIAM" 21 

" Who ploughs with pain his native lea, 
And reaps the labor of his hands. 
Or in the furrow musing stands : 
' Does my old friend remember me ? ' " 

Section cr. is a descriptive lyric of great beauty. 
It should be read and re-read till its charm and 
beauty find lodgment in the heart. 

Section cm. contains fourteen stanzas, whose 
meaning will not break upon the mind at first 
reading. This section is also remarkable for the 
perfection of its poetic diction. Note the prepon- 
derance of Saxon words and the great number of 
monosyllables. A most admirable interpretation 
of this section will be found in Brother Azarias' 
study of the " In Memoriam " in " Phases of 
Thought and Criticism." 

Tennyson tells us that this dream described in 
section cm. was a real dream, and he has furnished 
Mr. Gatty with this note : "T rather believe that 
the maidens are the muses, arts, etc. Everything 
that made life beautiful here we may hope may 
pass on with us beyond the grave." To Mr. 
Knowles the poet said that " the maidens are all 
the human powers and talents that do not pass 
with life, but go along with it." The " river "is 
"life," and the " hidden summits" are the high, 
the divine, — the origin of life." The sea in the 
fourth stanza is eternity. The seventh stanza 



22 STUDIES IN POETRY 

refers to " the great progress of the age as well as 
the opening of another world ; " and the ninth to 
" all the great hopes of science and men." 

Section cix. is valuable as setting forth the char- 
acter and gifts of Arthur Hallam : 

" Heart-affluence in discursive talk 
From household fountains never dry; 
The critic clearness of an eye, 

That saw thro' all the Muses' walk ; 

" And manhood fused with female grace 
In such a sort, the child would twine 
A trustful hand, unask'd, in thine, 
And find his comfort in thy face." 

The last lyric, or section, in "In Memoriam" 

contains the whole idea of the poem. Tennyson 

,.„. ~ , has struggled through doubt and dark- 
Tile Deep Im- && & 

port of the ness and has risen to the pure light of 
Last Lyric. j^^ Thig final lyric ^^i^ the 

key to the poet's successful struggle with doubt 
and sorrow into the clear light of faith. And 
this clear light of faith has been reached, not 
through reasoning, but an act of the will. So the 
poet sings in the final lyric : 

" O living will that shalt endure, 
- When all that seems shail suffer shock, 

Rise in the spiritual rock, 
Flow thro' our deeds and make them pure, 



"IN MEMORIAM" 23 

" That we may lift from out the dust 
A voice as unto him that hears, 
A cry above the conquered years 
To one that with us works, and trust, 

" With faith that conies of self-control, 
The truths that never can be proved 
Until we close with all we loved, 
And all we flow from, soul in soul." 

QUESTIONS. 

1. Why is " In Memoriam " called a world-poem % 

2. What should be our approach to a clear, careful, and 
sympathetic interpretation of this great masterpiece? 

3. What is meant by the germ-thought, or poetic mo- 
ment of a poem ? 

4. What stanza or stanzas contain the germ-thought of 
"In Memoriam " % 

5. Discuss, briefly, the plan and technique of the poem. 

6. Point out some of the Catholic aspects of " In Me- 
moriam." 

7. Illustrate the personal and impersonal character of 
the poem. 

8. What three epochs of grief are developed in the 
poem % 

9. Show the effect of time on Tennyson's sorrow, as re- 
flected through the anniversaries of Arthur Hallam's death. 

10. What do the contrasts that mark these periods of 
grief indicate ? 

11. Illustrate the beauty and significance of some of 
the lyrics in the poem. 



BROWNING'S "A DEATH IN THE 
DESERT." 

It will be noticed that Browning has a most 
abrupt method of introducing his subject. Some- 
Thesettin of ** mes » * n consequence of this, we may 
"A Death in read page after page of one of his 
the Desert " 

poems before we can quite know whither 

we are going. To understand Browning fully, 
to catch the connection and antecedents of his 
thought, it would be necessary that the student 
should be a companion of the poet's own reading 
and research, which were multifarious — it might 
be almost said universal. 

It is said that Browning, on being once asked 
why he did not popularize and make easy the 
study of his poems, replied that he did " not write 
for the smoking-room." It will be well, we think, 
if every student who takes up the study of Brown- 
ing would treasure these words of the great seer 
in his heart, — if he would fruitfully realize how 
serious and laborious is the effort to follow in the 
footsteps of the poet's thought. 




%#Uh^ /i>Z€n^ 



tt-^ttf 



"A DEATH IN THE DESERT" 25 

Brother Azarias, in his essay on Browning, in 
" Books and Reading," says that he would not rec- 
ommend the study of Browning to children in years 
or to children in mind. Certainly, Browning was 
no " idle singer of an empty day." His lines are 
freighted with the very deepest meaning, and the 
study of his poems, in this our day of literary dilet- 
tanteism and palaver, is indeed a very tonic of the 
gods. 

In studying " A Death in the Desert," it will be 
well for us to gain our approach to the poem first. 
Like Browning's magnum opus, " The Ring and 
the Book," this poem is true in spirit, though 
of course in detail it is largely the work of the 
poet's imagination. The manner in which the 
poet breathes into old dead facts, fusing his soul 
into the '.' inert stuff," and thus planting life where 
death had been before, and giving to the dead facts 
3, " resurrection and uprise," is well illustrated by 
Browning in the following lines ; 

" Was not Elisha once? — 
Who bade them lay his staff on a corpse-face. 
There was no voice, no hearing : he went in 
Therefore and shut the door upon them twain. 
And prayed unto the Lord : and he went up 
And ]ay upon the corpse, dead on the couch, 
And put his mouth upon its mouth, his eyes 
Upon its eyes, his hands upon its hands, 



26 STUDIES IN POETRY 

And stretched him on the flesh ; the flesh waxed warm : 
And he returned, walked to and fro the house, 
And went up, stretched him on the flesh again, 
And the eyes opened. 'T is a credible feat 
With the right man and way." 

There is«a certain kinship in Browning's four 
religious poems : " Caliban upon Setebos," fcC Cleon," 
a Group of Re- " Rabbi Ben Ezra," and "A Death in 
ngious Poems. t ] ie Desert;" and in the study of the 
latter poem it would be literary wisdom to group 
these four together. Each poem is representative 
of a particular phase of religious thought : " the 
natural, uncultured reasoning of the savage, the cul- 
tured reasoning of the Greek, the inspired reason- 
ing of the Jew, and the reason based on the belief 
in incarnation of the Christian." It will be noticed 
that the Setebos which Caliban conceives is a 
reflection from his own nature ; but Cleon, the 
cultured Greek, has advanced beyond- the stage 
where his God is a reflection of himself. The 
difference between Cleon and the Rabbi in " Rabbi 
Ben Ezra," as to their idea of the progress of the 
human soul, is that Cleon's progress is an intel- 
lectual progress ; while the Rabbi's is a spiritual 
progress. In the " Death in the Desert " it is 
the God of love that is made manifest. No 
place is accorded doubt by St. John. Note how 
the various stages of religious belief as exemplified 



"A DEATH IN THE DESERT" 27 

by Caliban and Cleon are set forth in the follow- 
ing lines : 

- " First, like the brute, obliged by facts to learn, 

Next, as man may, obliged by his own mind, 
Bent, habit, nature, knowledge turned to law. 
God's gift was that man should conceive of truth 
And yearn to gain it, catching at mistake, 
As midway help till he reach fact indeed." 

It was the attacks upon the historical bases of 
Christianity, so vigorously maintained in Germany 
during the beginning and middle of what Deter- 
the present century by Strauss and ^^ShS 
other sceptical philosophers, that de- the Desert." 
termined in Browning's mind the form of the 
" Death in the Desert." We feel sure, from the 
unattractive description he gives of the professor 
in " Christmas Eve," that Browning had little sym- 
pathy w^ith this band of sceptics. 

In the critical examination of the evano-elical 

o 

records, the Gospel of St. John suffered most. 
Strauss denied that St. John had anything to do 
with its composition, pronouncing it to be a con- 
troversial work written by some learned Greek 
Gnostic about the close of the second century. 
In his poem " A Death in the Desert " Browning 
restores the St. John of the Gospel, — the disciple 
of love who leaned on his Master's breast at supper, 

— mystical and visionary as* became him who had 



28 STUDIES IN POETRY 

received the revelation of Patmos. It is wonder- 
ful how Browning has breathed into this poem — 
endued it with — the very spirit and character of 
St. John, the herald of Love Divine. As the last 
survivor of those who had seen and known Christ, 
St. John, realizes the responsibility which rests upon 
him, and he is fearful of the heresies already be- 
ginning to disturb the Church, particularly the 
Ebionites, or followers of Cerinthus. 

Now, in order to obtain some definite idea of 
this noble poem, and reach its meaning, we must 
first seek the significance and intent of 
its prologue. This meaning is well set 
forth by Rev. G. W. Pope, D. D., in his study of 
this poem, in the following passage : " Some Chris- 
tian, whose name is not given (9, 10), is supposed 
to be examining his library, — looking up and 
classifying his choice treasures. One imagines 
that he was an Ephesian (or perhaps an Alex- 
andrian) ; that he may have lived in the beginning 
of the third century; that it was a time of hot 
persecution, when he was in daily peril of death ; 
and that he is looking over a few of the more 
ancient Christian records to strengthen himself for 
coming trial by the contemplation of the struggles 
of those that had gone before. He finds among 
others a parchment scroll attributed to Pamphylax 
of Antioch, who had died a martyr in Ephesus, 



"A DEATH IN THE DESERT" 29 

just after the death of St. John the Apostle. This 
manuscript is described in a very minute and 
realistic way. It is No. 5 in his library; consists 
of three skins of parchment glued together ; is in 
the Greek language ; is incomplete, since it ranges 
from Epsilon to Mu, so that four sections — pages, 
we may call them — are missing in the beginning, 
and perhaps some at the end. This precious 
manuscript is kept in a ' select chest,' an ark 
containing the most precious part of his literary 
treasures. This chest — the poet may have seen 
such an one in several museums — w^as stained and 
rendered proof against the attacks of insects by 
being rubbed with turpentine, was covered with 
hair cloth, and had on its front the Xi, since it had 
been given him by a relative named Xanthus ' now 
at peace.' Two other letters seem to have been on 
the chest. These were the initials of his own 
names, or perhaps the first and last letters of his 
ordinary name. This name he will not state, but 
instead of it signs his note with a cross, ' to show I 
wait his coming with the rest.' Why he withheld 
his name, we are left to conjecture ; probably it 
was humility, since there is one Name that is above 
every name and alone worthy to be held in remem- 
brance. There is throughout a remarkable reti- 
cence as to names : even St. John is not here dis- 
tinctly called so. The intensely real religious tone 



30 STUDIES IN POETRY 

— the spirit of primitive Christianity — is heard 
and felt in the minutest details of the poem." 

The sixty-eight lines, from line thirteen to line 
eighty-one, are descriptive and narrative, and re- 
st. John in the late what happened in the desert cave 
Desert. before the apostle began the great dis- 

course in uttering which he died. 

An edict had been issued in the time of Trajan, 
A. D. 98-117, ordering the seizure and death of all 
Christians, and when tidings of this edict reached 
Ephesus, Pamphylax himself, with Xanthus (a kins- 
man of the owner of the manuscript) and another 
Christian, called Valens, assisted by a strong Bac- 
trian convert and a Christian boy, bore the aged 
and dying apostle off to a place of safety in the 
desert, where lie lingered on for sixty days. 

The place of retreat is fully described. It is a 
cave in a sandy plain. There are three compart- 
ments in the cave, the most interior admitting no 
light, and the " midmost grotto " a few straggling 
rays at noontide. Into this " midmost grotto " St. 
John's loving attendants, feeling that his death is 
imminent, now bear him, that he may die in the 
light. The picture of the dying apostle amid the 
group of faithful followers is most touching : 

" ' Here is wine/ answered Xanthus — dropped a drop ; 
I stooped and placed the lap of cloth aright, 
Then chafed his right hand, and the Boy his left : 



" A DEATH IN THE DESERT" 31 

But Valens had bethought him, and produced 

And broke a ball of nard and made perfume. 

Only he did — not so much wake, as — turn 

And smile a little as a sleeper does 

If any dear one call him, touch his face 

And smiles and loves, but will not be disturbed. 

Then Xanthus said a prayer, but still he slept ; 

(It is the Xanthus that escaped to Rome, 

Was burned and could not write the Chronicle.) 

Then the Boy sprang up from his knees and ran 

Stung by the splendor of a sudden thought,, 

And fetched the seventh plate of graven lead 

Out of the secret chamber, found a place, 

Pressing with finger on the deeper dints, 

And spoke, as 't were his mouth proclaiming first 

1 T am the Resurrection and the Life. 1 " 

Beginning with line eighty-two, the writer of 

the manuscript adds a note professing Tlie Three 

1 . L . & Souls : What 

to give a gloss or interpretation of a Does, what 
passage in St. John's own writings : What j s . 

" [This is the doctrine he was wont to teach, 
How divers persons witness in each man, 
Three souls which make np one soul : first, to wit, 
A soul of each and all the bodily parts, 
Seated therein, which works, and is What Does, 
And has the use of Earth, and ends the man 
Downward : but tending upward for advice, 
Grows into and again is grown into 
By the next soul, which, seated in the brain, 
Useth the first with its collected use, 
And feeleth, thinketh, willeth, — is What Knows : 



32 STUDIES IN POETRY 

Which duly tending upward in its turn, 

Grows into and again is grown into 

By the last soul, that uses both the first, 

Subsisting whether they assist or no, 

And constituting man's self, is What Is — 

And leans upon the former, makes it play 

As that played off the first : and tending up, 

Holds, is upheld, by God, and ends the man 

Upward in that dread point of intercourse, 

Nor needs a place, for it returns to Him, 

What Does, What Knows, What Is ; three souls, one man.] " 

According to Browning this curious gloss or 
commentary (of Theotypas, an imaginary person- 
age) supplies an explanation of tlie spiritual and 
subjective character of St. John's faith. The doc- 
trine set forth in this strange passage seems to 
have in it something of Plato's idea of the 
Three Souls in each man — the Vegetative, the 
Sensitive or Active, and the Intellectual. Of 
course there can be no division of the human soul. 
Its unity is insisted upon by all Catholic philoso- 
phers ; and Dante, whose philosophy is the phi- 
losophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, testifies to — 

. . . an 1 alma sola 
Che vice e sente e se in se rigira. 

" . . . one only soul 
Which lives, and feels, and on itself revolves." 

Browning's whole purport in this poem, "A 
Death in the Desert," is to diminish the importance 



"A DEATH IN THE DESERT" 33 

of history and tradition as witness and proof of 
the divine origin of Christianity, and The General 
fall back upon the Love and Knowledge 5eattto°ttfi A 
which Christ left to mankind as endur- Desert." 
ing evidences of His divinity. And shall man 
now, when he has gained such love and knowledge, 
doubt their very source? 

u I say the acknowledgment of God in Christ, 
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee 
All questions in the earth and out of it, 
And has so far advanced thee to be wise. 
Wouldst thou improve this to re-prove the proved ? 
In life 's mere minute, with power to use that proof, 
Leave knowledge and revert to how it sprung? 
Thou hast it; use it and forthwith or die ! " 

In this poem, " A Death in the Desert," Brown- 
ing truthfully represents St. John as especially the 
teacher of love. As St. Paul is the The Personal- 
teacher of faith and Christian philos- character 
ophy so is St. John the herald of Love of st. John. 
Divine. It was Love, as the essence of the gospel, 
that filled the apostle's mind : 

" Such ever was love's way : to rise, it stoops. 
Since I, whom Christ's mouth taught, was bidden teach, 
I went, for many years, about the world, 
Saying ' It was so ; so I heard and saw.' 
Speaking as the case asked : and men believed. 
Afterwards came the message to myself 
In Patmos isle ; I was not bidden teach, 
3 



34 STUDIES IN POETRY 

But simply listen, take a book and write, 

Nor set down other than the given word, 

With nothing left to my arbitrament 

To choose or change : I wrote and men believed." 

Two words are used in the Latin Vulgate to ex- 
press Christ's love for St. John, — diligebat and ama- 
bat, the latter word marking a personal affection. 
It is evident that Browning, believed in the Divine 
inspiration under which St. John wrote his Gospel, 
as he makes the apostle say: 

" What first were guessed as points, I now knew stars. 

Guarded and guided still to see and speak." 

We find at the end of St. John's discourse an 
epitome of Browning's religious faith as expressed 
Browning's [ n a number of his poems. Summed 

Religious . 

Faith as set up, we find this faith contained in the 
*£«•"• lines: 

" A man's reach should exceed his grasp 
Or what 's a heaven for ? " 

According to- Browning, man's life consists in 
never-ceasing progress. "The godlike power is 
imparted to him gradually, and step by step he 
approaches nearer to absolute truth — to divine 
perfection." He was made — 

" Lower than God who knows all and can all, 
Higher than beasts which know and can, so far 



"A DEATH IN THE DESERT " 35 

As each beast's limit, perfect to an end, 

Nor conscious that they know, nor craving more ; 

While man knows partly, but conceives beside, 

Creeps ever on from fancies to the fact, 

And in this striving, this converting air 

Into a solid he may grasp and use, 

Finds progress, man's distinctive mark alone, 

Not God's and not the beasts' f God is, they are, — 

Alan partly is and wholly hopes to be.'" 

Should man cease to strive, and renounce the 
divine ideals, he brings upon himself the conclem- 
' nation of death : 

" If ye demur, this judgment on your head, 
Never to reach the ultimate, angel's law, 
Indulging every instinct of the soul 
There where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing ! " 

This strong and noble poem is studded with 
beautiful passages. Perhaps the finest of these 
is where the apostle, in prophetic a Passage of 
vision, looks down the avenues of Rare Beaut y« 
time and beholds the disciples of Christ ponder- 
ing and discoursing in divers lands of the things 
which he had taught and written : 

" I see you stand conversing, each new face, 
Either in fields of yellow summer eves, 
On islets yet unnamed amid the sea; 
Or pace for shelter 'neath a portico 
Out of the crowd in some enormous town 
Where now the lark sings in a solitude ; 
Or muse upon blank heaps of stone. and sand 
Idly conjectured to be Ephesus." 



36 STUDIES IN POETRY 

QUESTIONS. 

1. What is Browning's method of introducing his 
subject 1 ? 

2. What is necessary to catch the connection and ante- 
cedents of his thought and to understand Browning fully ? 

3. What reason did Browning give upon being ques- 
tioned why he did not popularize the study of his poems ? 

4. Name Browning's four religious poems, and explain 
their kinship. 

5. How does Browning exemplify the various stages of 
religious belief? 

6. What determined the form of " A Death in the 
Desert " ? 

7. What reason have we to suppose that Browning had 
no sympathy with the German sceptical philosophers, 
Strauss and others ? 

8. What did these sceptics affirm regarding the Gos- 
pel of St. John \ 

9. How may we obtain some definite idea of "A 
Death in the Desert"? 

10. What is the meaning of this poem? Explain the 
Prologue. 

11. Relate Browning's description of St. John in the 
desert — line thirteen to line eighty-one. 

12. What, according to Browning, supplies an explana- 
tion of the spiritual and subjective character of St. John's 
faith ? 

13. What is the general import of "A Death in the 
Desert " ? 



"A DEATH IN THE DESERT" 37 

14. How does Browning in his poem represent the 
character and personality of St. John ? 

15. What was Browning's religious faith as set forth 
in the poem 1 

16. Indicate some of the most beautiful passages in the 
poem. 



MRS. BROWNING'S "SONNETS FROM 
THE PORTUGUESE." 

Love has ever been a fitting theme for the sonnet- 
eer, from Spenser to Rossetti. Enshrined in this 
Love and the art-form the poet has poured out his 
sonnet. tide of love and tenderly confessed to 

the passionate emotions of his heart. Fourteen 
iambic lines and the confession is made ! The one 
idea, the one sentiment, reigns supreme. The ses- 
tet crowns the octave. The thought must be 
gathered up intense, not weakened by diffusion. 

How suitable, then, is not the sonnet as a vehicle 
of the loftiest thoughts as well as the tenderest and 
most impassioned emotions ! The vernacular of 
love is clear and direct — just what the sonnet 
must be. It burns and blazes as a star, transfigur- 
ing the whole world around; the sonnet must be 
luminous, too, lighting up with its beams the world 
of thought embodied within its lines. 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the greatest woman 

poet of any age, has given us a cycle of sonnets, 

Mrs Brown- known under the title of " Sonnets 

ing's cycle of from the Portuguese," which contain 

some of the finest subjective poetry to 




£?fivJ^tm^ztJv?<< 



PcsKS*? 



7 



" SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE " 39 

be found in English literature. " Their form re- 
minds us," says Stedman, " of an English proto- 
type, and it is no sacrilege to say that their music 
is showered from a higher and purer atmosphere 
than that of the Swan of Avon. We need not 
enter upon cold comparison of their respective ex- 
cellences ; but Shakespeare's personal poems were 
the overflow of his impetuous youth : his broader 
vision, that took a world within its ken, was abso- 
lutely objective ; while Mrs. Browning's Love 
Sonnets are the outpourings of a woman's tender- 
est emotions at an epoch when her art was most 
mature, and her whole nature exalted by a passion 
that to such a being comes but once and for all. 
Here indeed the singer rose to her height. Here 
she is absorbed in rapturous utterance, radiant and 
triumphant with her own joy. The mists have 
risen and her sight is clear. Her mouthing and 
affectation are forgotten, her lips cease to stammer, 
the lyrical spirit has full control. The sonnet, 
artificial in weaker hands, becomes swift with feel- 
ing, red with a ' veined humanity,' the chosen 
vehicle of a royal woman's vows." 

.The history of how the " Sonnets from the Portu- 
guese " came to be written has been Howthe 
given to the world. They are the " sonnets from 
notes and chronicle of Mrs. Browning's guese" came 
betrothal. Mr. Browning little sus- t0 be Written * 



40 STUDIES IN POETRY 

pected that the circumstances of their betrothal had 
led Miss Barrett into any artistic expression of feel- 
ing. During the months of their brief courtship 
neither poet showed any verses to the other. 

After a honeymoon spent in Paris, Browning 
and his young wife took up their residence in Pisa, 
each pursuing his or her own literary work. One 
day early in 1847, Mrs. Browning came downstairs 
from her literary study and pushing a packet of 
papers into Browning's pocket told him to read it, 
and to tear it up if he did not like it ; and then 
she fled again to her own room. 

This parcel contained the series of sonnets which 
have rendered the name of Mrs. Browning illustri- 
ous. These sonnets were first published in the 
volumes of 1850, and in order to veil their true 
authorship it was agreed, at the suggestion of 
Browning, that they should appear under the title 
of " Sonnets from the Portuguese." 

Spenser, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Rossetti 
— each has given us a deliberate set of sonnets, 
Mrs. Brown- but it is not too much to say that Mrs. 
other n Great Browning's cycle of love poems excels 
sonneteers. ^ e wor k f these four masters. 

Of course, strictly speaking, these forty-four ex- 
quisite sonnets of Mrs. Browning's are not sonnets 
at all. It is true they are built after the Petrarchan 
model, but with the exception of the first, fourth, 



"SOKNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE" 41 

and thirteenth, they cannot be said to realize with 
any distinctness the idea and the peculiar artistic 
effect of the sonnet proper. 

As a critic points out, the natural bent of Mrs. 
Browning was certainly not to the sonnet. She 
was too dithyrambic, too tumultuous to be wil- 
lingly restrained within a rigid form of verse. 
One of the earliest sonnets of her mature years is 
entitled u The Soul's Expression," and it is inter- 
esting as a revelation of her own consciousness of 
the difficulties wdiich technical art presented to her : 

" With stammering lips and insufficient sound 
I strive and struggle to deliver right 
That music of my nature, day and night 
With dream and thought and feeling interwound, 
And inly answering all the senses round 
With octaves of a mystic depth and height 
Which step out grandly to the infinite 
From the dark edges of the sensual ground ! 
This song of soul I struggle to outbear 
Through portals of the sense, sublime and whole, 
And utter all myself into the air. 
But if I did it as the thunder-roll 
Breaks its own cloud, my flesh would perish there, 
Before that dread apocalypse of soul." 

A. study of the sonnet will reveal the fact that 
the sonnet architecture of Petrarch, TheCliarac . 
Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, teristicsofa 
widely differ. The Italian is generally 



42 STUDIES IN POETRY 

taken as the normal type, but it would be folly to 
say that, because a sonnet is not fashioned after 
the Italian type, therefore it should not be regarded 
as a sonnet proper. Speaking of this deviation 
from the normal type, Mark Pattison says : " How 
far any given specimen may deviate from type 
without ceasing to be a sonnet is as impossible to 
decide as it is in botany to draw the line between 
a variety and a distinct species. Perhaps we may 
say that success is the best test, and that a brilliant 
example justifies its own structural form. Or we _ 
may look for legislative sanction in consent, and 
demand compliance with those rules which the 
majority of poets agree to respect. The mighty 
masters are a law unto themselves and the validity 
of their legislation will be attested and held against 
all comers by the splendour of an unchangeable 
success." 

We came across the following wise bit on the 
sonnet not long ago, and we think it strikes off 
fairly well the chief characteristics of a good 
sonnet : 

" A sonnet should be grave, but not heavy. It 
must have a severity tempered by sweetness, like 
the breviary character of the Venerable Bede. It 
must linger meditatively; it must not loiter or 
fumble with its meaning. It must be sinuous, 
never headlong ; feeling its rhymes delicately, not 



"SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE " 43 

falling upon them ; for these are less rhymes than 

the most prominent of many assonances upon all 

of which the rhythm hangs." 

It will be interesting for the student to take a 

Petrarchan sonnet, a Shakespearean sonnet, and a 

Wordsworthian sonnet, and note the T+ 1 . A 

. Italian and 

difference in their architecture. Per- English Types 
haps the great difference between the 
English and Italian sonnet is to be found in the 
fact that in the English sonnet the sense flows on 
without break from the octave into the sestet ; 
whereas the Italian sonnet is required at the end 
of the octave to have a complete change in the 
idea. So that while the form of a sonnet may be 
Italian, the progress of the idea it embodies may 
be English. 

The rhyme-schemes of the three chief types of 
Italian sonnets are the following : Type L, abbaabba 
cdecde. Type II., abbaabba cdcdcd. Type III., 
abbaabba cdedce. 

A few of the finest sonnets in the English 
language are : Wordsworth's " The World is too 
much with us " ; Longfellow's " Sonnet on Na- 
ture " ; Byron's " Sonnet on Chillon " ; Keats' u On 
Looking into Chapman's Homer " ; and Shake- 
speare's " Shall I Compare thee to a Summer's 
Day?" 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti has given us a wonder- 



44 STUDIES IN POETRY 

fully fine cycle of sonnets in his " House of Life." 
Rossetti's ^* s introductory sonnet on the Sonnet 
sonnet on a is very fine and is worthy of reproduc- 
Sonnet. ;.-•/■• 

tion here: 

" A sonnet is a moment's monument, — 
Memorial from the Soul's eternity 
To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be, 
Whether for lustral rite or dire portent, 
Of its own arduous fulness reverent : 
Carve it in ivory or in ebony, 
As Day or Night may rule ; and let Time see 
Its flowering crest impearled and orient. 
A sonnet is a coin : its face reveals 
The soul, — its converse to what Power 't is due : — 
Whether for tribute to the august appeals 
Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue 
It serve ; or, 'mid the dark wharf's cavernous breath, 
In Charon's palm it pay the toll to Death." 

A key to the central idea which informs this 
cycle of sonnets is found in the opening sonnet. 
The central It is " an overture containing the motive 
nttsfromtiTe of the canticle ; ' not Death but Love' 
Portuguese." j ia( j seized her unaware." Laughing 
Love has invaded her sequestered chamber : ' 

" I thought once how Theocritus had sung 
Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years, 
Who each one in a gracious hand appears 
To bear a gift for mortals old or young ; 
And, as I mused it in his antique tongue ; 
I saw in gradual vision, through my tears, 



"SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE" 45 

The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years, 

Those of my own life, who by turns had flung 

A shadow across me. Straightway I was 'ware, 

So weeping, how a mystic shape did move 

Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair ; 

And a voice said in mastery, while I strove, 

4 Guess now who holds thee ? ' — c Death,' I said. But there 

The silver answer rang, ' Not Death but Love.' " 

Iii the fifth sonnet there is a beautiful piece of 
imagery. It is that in which Mrs. Browning 
likens herself to Electra pouring her sepulchral 
urn and all its ashes at the feet of Love. 

Between sonnets five and six the student should 
read Mrs. Browning's little poem " Question and 
Answer." It belongs to the same orbit of thought 
and emotion and is co-radical with " Sonnets from 
the Portuguese." Here it is : 

" Love you seek for presupposes 
Summer heat and sunny glow. 
Tell me, do you find moss-roses 
Budding, blooming in the snow ? 
Snow might kill the rose-tree's root : 
Shake it quickly from your foot, 
Lest it harm you as you go. 

From the ivy where it dapples 

A gray ruin, stone by stone, 

Do you look for grapes or apples 

Or for sad green leaves alone ? 

Pluck the leaves off, two or three ; 

Keep them for morality 

When you shall be safe and gone." 



46 STUDIES IN POETRY < 

In the tenth sonnet Mrs. Browning makes full 
confession of her love : 

" And when I say at need 
/ love thee . . . mark ! . . . I love thee — in thy sight 
I stand transfigured, glorified aiight, 
With conscience of the new rays that proceed 
Out of my face towards thine." 

From this point forward the sonnets play in 
their exquisite masque as if to celestial dance 
music with the wild thoughts and tremulous 
frolics of accepted love. 

In the fourteenth sonnet Mrs. Browning pleads 
that Browning may not love her for her desert's 
sake, but for love's sake : 

" If thou must love me let it be for naught 
Except for love's sake only. Do not say 
1 1 love her for her smile, her look, her way 
Of speaking gently, for a trick of thought 
That falls in well with mine and certes brought 
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day ; ' 
For these things in themselves beloved may 
Be changed, or change for thee : and love so wrought • 
May be un wrought so. Neither love me for 
Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry : 
A creature might forget to weep, who bore 
Thy comfort long and lose thy love thereby. 
But love me for love's sake that evermore 
Thou mayst love on through love's eternity." 



"SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE " 47 

At the end of the eighteenth sonnet the follow- 
ing little lyric " Inclusions " should be inserted — 
it is really a part of the sonnets : 

" Oh, wilt thou have my hand, dear, to lie along in thine? 
As a little stone in a running stream, it seems to lie and 

pine. 
Now drop the poor, pale hand, dear, unfit to plight with 

thine. 

" Oh, wilt thou have my cheek, dear, drawn closer to thine 

own? 
My cheek is white, my cheek is worn by many a tear run 

down. 
Now leave a little space, dear, lest it should wet thine own. 

"Oh, must thou have my soul, dear, commingled with thy 

soul? 
Red grows the cheek and warm the hand; the part is in the 

whole : 
Nor hands nor cheeks keep separate when soul is joined to 

soul." 

It will be noticed that these sonnets are not 
heaped together in accidental sequence as Spenser's 
and Shakespeare's seem to be, but are 

• • rm Their Histori- 

arranged historically. They move along cai Arrange- 
from the first surprise of unexpected men ' 
passion to the final complete resignation of soul 
and body in a rapture which is to be sanctified and 
heightened by death itself. 

Though all these sonnets exhibit the rhyme- 



48 STUDIES IN POETRY 

scheme of the Italian type of sonnet, — that is, 
Mould and abbaabba cdedcd, — they are not organ- 
Technique, ically sonnets. As Professor Corson 
points out, in their rhyme-schemes they take on 
the exterior semblance of what organically they 
are not. The whole cycle is a beautiful casket of 
gems, full of lyrical splendor, deeply inlaid with 
the rubies and diamonds of a woman's purest and 
truest love. 

The key-note of Mrs. Browning as an artist 
was sincerity. This is the quality which holds 
How Far together the edifice of her style. Her 

"Sonnets nature was intense. When love in- 

tuguese" Re- vadecl the chamber of her heart she 
Geniusof Mrs. hearkened to its whisperings, left her 
Browning. polar region of dreams, solitude, and 
introspection, and lived in the arms of her new- 
born world of thought. The long closed tideways 
of her woman's heart were opened and Love's 
torrent swept all before it. 

" Sonnets from the Portuguese " are a record, 
a chronicle, of the genesis of love in the pure and 
noble heart of the world's great priestess of song. 
They not only chronicle every heart-beat of her 
love, but reflect the strength of her genius as an 
artist. 

It is peculiarly true that women poets rarely, if 
ever, take us into their confidence when they deal 



"SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE " 49 

with love. A natural delicacy leads them to write 
of love so platonically or so obscurely that it is 
difficult at times to know just what they wish to 
communicate. There is no doubting the meaning 
of Mrs. Browning in her " Sonnets from the Por- 
tuguese." Her " song of soul " is clear, and de- 
livered with no stammering lips. The burden of 
her heart is love, and this she clothes with a tech- 
nical beauty and sincerity that glorify the heart of 
woman. 

Before Robert Browning achieved eminence as 
a poet, Tennyson and Mrs. Browning were the 
obvious inheritors of Wordsworth's " sonnets 
throne. The two volumes of 1844 tuguese"and 

lifted Mrs. Browning' at once to a place "^Memo- 
o L nam' f con- 

among the living poets of her country, trasted. 

Tennyson's great elegy, "In Memoriam," which 

is devoted to the analysis of philosophic grief, 

was published about the same time that Mrs. 

Browning's " Sonnets from the Portuguese " 

appeared. There is a certain analogy between 

the two poems — one dealing with grief the other 

with love. " In Memoriam " is the record of a 

great friendship. " Sonnets from the Portuguese," 

one of the acknowledged glories of our literature, is 

built patiently and unquestionably on the union in 

stainless harmony of two of the most distinguished 

spirits which our century has produced. 

4 



50 STUDIES IN POETRY 

QUESTIONS. 

1. Define the sonnet. 

2. Why is the sonnet suitable as a form of verse to 
express the emotions of love ? 

2. What is Mrs. Browning's place among the women 
poets of the world ? 

4. What, in brief, is Stedman's appreciation of Mrs. 
Browning's u Sonnets from the Portuguese " ? 

5. Eelate how these sonnets came to be written. 

6. Contrast the sonnets of Mrs. Browning with the 
sonnets of Spenser, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and 
Rossetti. 

7. Should " Sonnets from the Portuguese/ 5 be really 
designated sonnets'? 

8. What are the characteristics of a good sonnet ? 

9. Explain the difference between the Italian and 
English types of the sonnet. 

10. What is the central idea in "Sonnets from the 
Portuguese " % 

11. Are these sonnets heaped together in accidental 
sequence ? 

12. Are these poems organically sonnets? 

13. What was the keynote of Mrs. Browning as an 
artist 1 

14. How far do these sonnets reflect the genius of 
Mrs. Browning? 

15. Contrast " In Memoriam" and "Sonnets from the 
Portuguese." 




&* ^Trfif^Trr^t 



WORDSWORTH'S ODE "ON INTIMA- 
TIONS OF IMMORTALITY." 

Wordsworth's ode "On Intimations of Im- 
mortality " is, perhaps, the most organic poem to 
be found in the whole range of English An organic 
literature. It is, indeed, an embodi- Poem - 
ment of the happiest and truest inspiration. The 
idea and matter in the ode so interpenetrate — are 
so fused — and the poet's individuality becomes so 
absorbed in the creation of his imagination, that a 
Wordsworthian poem of rare power and vital beauty 
is the result. 

Where there is a lack of true inspiration this 
organic character in a poem will be wanting, and 
the idea will seem to stand above the matter as a 
master above a slave. The absence, too, of that 
sacred flame which fuses and fashions the precious 
ore of poetic thought with its unifying power, will 
affect the organic character of a poem not only on 
its thought side, but also on its metrical side. 

Wordsworth's " Ode to Immortality " is a most 
vital creation and represents the genius of Words- 
worth at its very best. It is the embodiment of 



52 STUDIES IN POETRY 

the poet's own mystical ideality, and may be justly 
regarded as the crowning effort of modern imag- 
inative discourse. Emerson calls it the high- 
water mark of English thought in the nineteenth 
century, and Principal Shairp says that it marks 
the highest limit which the tide of poetic inspira- 
tion has reached in England within this century, 
or, indeed, since the days of Milton. 

Of this poem, " Ode on Intimations of Immor- 
wordsworth's tality," published in 1807, Wordsworth 
ont^orig^ wrote as follows in 1843, explanatory 
and import. f ft g genesis and import: 

"This was composed during my residence at 
Town End, Grasmere. Two years at least passed 
between the writing of the first four stanzas and 
the remaining part. To the attentive and com- 
petent reader, the whole sufficiently explains it- 
self ; but there may be no harm in adverting here 
to particular feelings or experiences of my own 
mind on which the structure of the poem partly 
rests. Nothing was more difficult for me in child- 
hood than to admit the notion of death as a state 
applicable to my own being. I have said else- 
where : 

" ' A simple child, 
That lightly draws its breath, 
And feels its life in every limb, 
What should it know of death ! ' 



"ON INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY " 53 

" But it was not so much from feelings of animal 
vivacity that my difficulty came as from a sense of 
the indomitableness of the spirit within me. I 
used to brood over the stories of Enoch and Elijah, 
and almost to persuade myself that, whatever 
might become of others, I should be translated in 
something of the same way to heaven. With a 
feeling congenial to this I was often unable to 
think of eternal things as having external exist- 
ence, and I communed with all that I saw as some- 
thing not apart from, but inherent in, my own 
immaterial nature. 

"Many times while going to school have I 
grasped at a wall or tree to recall myself from 
this abyss of idealism to reality. At that time I 
was afraid of such processes. In later periods of 
life I have deplored, as we all have reason to do, 
a subjugation of an opposite character, and have 
rejoiced over the remembrances as is expressed in 
the lines : 

" ' Obstinate questionings 
Of sense and outward things, 
Fallings from us, vanishings,' etc. 

"To that dream-like vividness and splendour 
which invest objects of sight in childhood, every 
one, I believe, if he would look back, could bear 
testimony, and I need not dwell upon it here ; but 
having in the poem regarded it as presumptive 



54 STUDIES IN POETRY 

evidence of a prior state of existence, I think it 
right to protest against a conclusion which has 
given pain to some good and pious persons, that I 
meant to inculcate such a belief. It is far too 
shadowy a notion to be recommended to faith 
as more than an element in our instincts of 
immortality. 

"But let us bear in mind that, though the idea 
is not advanced in revelation, there is nothing there 
to contradict it, and the fall of man presents an 
analogy in its favor. Accordingly, a pre-existent 
state has entered into the popular creeds of many 
nations, and among all persons acquainted with 
classic literature is known as an ingredient in 
Platonic philosophy. 

" Archimedes said that he could move the world 
if he had a point whereon to rest his machine. 
Who has not felt the aspirations as regards the 
world of his own mind? Having to wield some 
of its elements when I was impelled to write this 
poem on the ' Immortality of the Soul,' I took hold 
of the notion of pre-existence as having sufficient 
foundation in humanity for authorizing me to 
make for my purpose the best use of it I could 
as a poet." 

The germ, or shall we call it main idea of this 
its Germ in °de will be found in a fine poem by Henry 
Literature. Vaughan, a Platonic poet of the seven- 



"ON INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY" dd 

teenth century. The poem is entitled " The Re- 
treat." Here is the passage which embodies the 
germ : 

" Happy those early days when I 

Shin'd in, my angel-infancy ! 

Before I understood this place 

Appointed for my second race, 

Or taught my sonl to fancy aught 

But a white, celestial thought ; 

When yet I had not walked above 

A mile or two from my first love, 

And looking back — at that short space — 

Could see a glimpse of his bright face ; 

When on some gilded cloud or flower 

My gazing soul would dwell an hour, 

And in those weaker glories spy 

Some shadows of eternity : 

Before I taught my tongue to wound 

My conscience wdth a sinful sound, 

Or had the black art' to dispense 

A sev'ral sin to ev'ry sense, 

But felt through all this fleshly dress 

Bright shoots of everlastingness." 

Again in our later poets we find hints and glints 
of the informing idea in this poem. Shelley in 
his " Lament" touches it: 

" O World ! O life ! O time ! 
On w T hose last steps I climb, 
Trembling at that whereon I stood before — 
When will return the glory of your prime ? 
No more — oh, never more ! ' ' 



56 STUDIES IN POETRY 

Hood, in his poem " I remember, I remember," 
embodies a thought also kindred to this : 

" I remember, I remember, 
The fir trees dark and high ; 
I used to think their slender tops 
Were close against the sky. 
It was a childish ignorance, 
But now 't is little joy 
To know I 'm farther off from heav'n 
Than when I was a boy." 

In structure this great ode stands alone, being 

modelled on no other poem. Its rhythm, metre, 

rhyme, melody, harmony, and stanza, 
Its Technique. J . _ / . J _ 

are vital and organic, — the outcome 
of the unifying, or what Coleridge terms the esem- 
plastic power, of the feeling or emotion embodied 
in the poem. It should be remembered that poetic 
unities — metre, melody, rhythm, etc. — are not 
accidents or things apart from the life of a poem, 
but are inherent and contained in the divine en- 
ergy of the art work. 

The " Ode on Immortality " contains eleven 
stanzas of varied mould, dependent upon the char- 
acter of the sentiment poetically enhoused. It 
will be noticed that not only is the metre of this 
fine ode singularly appropriate, but its diction is 
equally felicitous. Had its stanzas been fashioned 
successively, in regular form, such structure would 



"ON INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY" 57 

have proved particularly suitable for the expres- 
sion qf definite thought ; but the irregular yields 
itself more pliantly to the imaginative passion 
which is of the very life, atmosphere, and essence 
of this poem. 

Referring to the structure and diction of the 
" Ode on Immortality," Aubrey de Vere says : 
" Parts of it are written in that 'large utterance/ 
at once majestic and simple, which makes so much 
of Wordsworth's poetry, when once read, haunt 
the ear forever. Parts of it are familiar even to 
roughness. That roughness was intentional and 
was not mitigated in the later editions. It was 
needed. The perfection of a poem may be gravely 
impaired by its uniform elaborateness ; as in archi- 
tecture ornament becomes offensive if it be not 
relieved by contrasted masses of occasional plain- 
ness or rudeness. Without such passages the sen- 
timent of this ode would have lacked its passionate 
impulse, and its doctrine would have been frozen 
into a scholastic theory. In this poem many 
extremes are reconciled. In no other has Words- 
worth's genius, contemplative at once and emo- 
tional, moved through so wide an arc." 

Of the two hundred and three verses which 
make up the ode, the metre of one hundred is iam- 
bic pentameter. This is the theme-metre of the 
ode — indeed, it is the measure in which the 



58 STUDIES IN POETRY 

greatest portion of English poetry is written. Of 
the other metres in the poem there are thirty-nine 
4xa, forty-four 3xa, ten 2xa, six 6xa, one 7xa, one 
2xxa plus x, one xxa, xa, xxa, xa, and one 3xa, ax, 
xa, — a representing in every case, according to 
Latham's method of metrical notation, an accented 
syllable, and x an unaccented syllable. 

It will further be observed that the more reflect- 
ive portions of the ode are expressed in the theme- 
metre — good examples being found in the eighth 
and eleventh stanzas. Where the thought is light 
and gay and gladsome, as in the tenth stanza, the 
notes are set to a shorter metre. 

The third stanza' contains a greater variety of 
metre than any other section of the ode. Notice 
how the music of the verses in their varied form 
serves as a chorus to the thought, expressing a 
mystic sympathy with it ; and notice, too, the exult- 
ant note attained in the last verse through the 
sweeping close imparted by the iambic heptameter 
(7xa). 

Again, it would be well for the student to note 
the rhyme-scheme, followed with the varying 
degrees of emphasis imparted, according to the 
nearness or remoteness of the rhyme. 

There are two marked and well defined transi- 

Three Divisions tioilS ill the thought of the poem — be- 

of the Poem. tween the fourth and fifth, and eighth 



"ON INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY" 59 

and ninth stanzas. The first four stanzas deal 
with a loss which has saddened a soul once self- 
sufficing ; the next four are devoted to a vindica- 
tion of the daring doctrine of the poem without 
trenching upon polemics; while the concluding- 
stanzas of the poem restore to the soul peace 
through the thought that the spiritual vision, cut 
off by the temporal things around, may be regained 
and the melancholy fear subdued by a return to 
the simple ways in which our childhood walked. 

In the first division of the poem is set forth the 
experience of our common humanity. In the first 
stanza the poet recalls his childhood, 

r . ' The Thought 

when all nature seemed to him to be in the First 
clothed in celestial light ; but now that 
he has reached the years of manhood this celestial 
light has given place to a more prosaic aspect in 
nature. In the next stanza — a piece of matchless 
description — there is revealed to him the fact 
that nature is still beautiful and fair in its varied 
phenomena; still he knows, realizes, that a glory 
has departed from the earth, — a glory which be- 
longed to the vision of his childhood. In the third 
and fourth stanzas the poet mingles in the great 
festival of nature. He hears the echoes from the 
mountain throng, and the winds come to him from 
the fields of sleep, but amidst this jubilee grief is 
borne in upon him through a single tree, a single 



60 STUDIES IN POETRY 

field, which speaks to him of something that is 
gone. The little pansy at his feet repeats the self- 
same tale. 

The thought in the second division contains the 
argument of the poem. It sets forth the fact that 

this earthly life is nothing more than a 
in the second sleep, or a forgetting, in the midst of 

the larger life of Eternity; that when 
man is born he brings with him recollections of the 
glory he has left behind him, and as he grows to 
manhood the remembrance becomes dimmer, until 
at length the grown man sees the sunrise glory 
fade away into the light of common day. 

The close of the first division is marked by sad- 
ness — gloom : 

" Whither is fled the visionary gleam ? 
Where is it now, the glory and the dream ? " 

The second division opens in hope and light. 
As Aubrey de Vere says, " A hundred bygone mus- 
ings have rushed to a single conclusion, and the 
problem is solved. Sharply, definitely, and with 
nothing of preface, the thought which has wrought 
deliverance is enunciated. The loss was even 
greater than it seemed to be ; but in its very great- 
ness there lives a secret hope. It was not the loss 
of that gleam which beautified this earth : it was 
the loss of a whole world, but of one that cannot 



"ON INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY" 61 

be lost forever. We have a higher birthplace than 
we know ; and our sorrow is itself a prophecy that 
the exile shall return to his country." 

11 Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting : 
The soul that rises with us, our life's star, 

Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
And cometh from afar : 

Not in entire forgetfulness, 

And not in utter nakedness, 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come 

From God, who is our home: 
Heaven lies about us in our infancy ! 
Shades of the prison-house begin to close 

Upon the growing boy, 
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, 

He sees it in his joy ; 
The youth, who daily farther from the East 

Must travel, still is Nature's priest, 

And by the vision splendid 

Is on his way attended ; 
At length the man perceives it die away, 
And fade into the light of common day." 

The succeeding three stanzas of the second divi- 
sion illustrate how the soul is gradually beguiled 
into a temporary f orgetf ulness of its celestial origin. 
The earth, his foster-mother, with a sort of cruel 
kindness does everything in her power to make 
him forget " that imperial palace whence he came." 
Environed by the moving pageantry of life " the 
little actor cons another part, descends from his 



62 STUDIES IN POETRY 

being's height," and wears the yoke which life and 
custom place upon his neck. 

In the seventh stanza is set forth the life of 
man from childhood to old age. It is practically 
Shakespeare's " Seven Ages of Man," as found in 
"As You Like It," Act n. ; Scene 1: "All the 
world's a stage," etc. 

The last stanza of the second division is probably 
more difficult of interpretation than any other 
section of the poem. Stopford Brooke, we think, 
lays bare its meaning very clearly in the following 
comment : 

" We can only catch the main idea among ex- 
pressions of the child, as the " best philosopher " 
the "eye among the blind," "mighty prophet," 
"seer blest," — expressions which taken separately 
have scarcely any recognizable meaning. By tak- 
ing them all together we feel, rather than see, 
that Wordsworth intended to say that the child, 
having lately come from a perfect existence, in 
which he saw truth directly and was at home with 
God, retains, unknown to us, that vision — and 
because he does, is the best philosopher, since he 
sees at once that which we through philosophy 
are endeavoring to reach; is the mighty prophet 
because in' his actions and speech he tells uncon- 
sciously the truths he sees, but the sight of which 
we have lost; is more closely haunted by God, 



"ON INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY" 63 

more near to the immortal life, more purely and 
brightly free, because he half shares in the pre- 
existent life and glory out of which he has come." 
The third division indicates the use of the 
change, and shows how it reacts upon the earlier 
disposition of the mind and tends to _ _ • 

r . . The Thought 

deepen the meaning of the first inti- in the Third 
mations of immortality. Man preserves 
through life a memory of his first estate. The 
obstinate questionings of sense and outward things 
make him but conscious of his own finiteness and 
the infinity towards which he is going, but which 
would not have been possible without his u shadowy 
recollections " of a time when he was intuitively 
conscious of an infinite from which he had come. 
He can never fully lose sight of this infiility — of 
the great "immortal sea" upon whose shores his 
childhood dreamed : 

" Hence in a season of calm weather, 
Though inlaud far we be, 
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea 
Which brought us hither ; 
Can in a moment travel thither ; 
And see the children sport upon the shore, 
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore." 

In the fourth book of " The Excursion " there is 
a passage closely allied in thought to the above 
lines, beginning with — 



64 STUDIES IN POETRY 

" I have seen 
A curious child who dwelt upon a tract 
Of inland ground, applying to his ear 
The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell ; " etc. 

Wordsworth regards the universe as a shell 
bespeaking communion with its native sea of God's 
Immensity and Omnipotence. The whole passage 
is very beautiful and very Wordsworthian in its 
thought and teaching. 

The sublime ode which we are considering ends 
in a hymn of praise, a reconcilement with nature, 
which forms the subject of its opening lines. The 
spiritual passion which touched and stirred and 
tossed its beating heart has sunk at the close into 
a tranquillity which retains but a ripple of the 
storm beyond the harbor bar. 

The estrangement of the poet from his loved 
nature is but for a brief season. She is still to 
him a very sacrament, bestowing upon 'him her 
spiritual gifts and graces — an intermediary be- 
tween the source of all life and love and the 
heart of man : 

" And O ye fountains, meadows, hills, and groves, 
Forbode not any severing of our loves ! 
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might; 
I only have relinquished one delight, 
To live beneath your more habitual sway. 
I love the Brooks which down their channels fret, 



" ON INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY" 65 

Even more than when I tripped lightly as they ; 
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day, 

Is lovely yet ; 
The Clouds that gather round the setting sun 
Do take a sober coloring from an eye 
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality ; 
Another race hath been, and other palms are won. 
Thanks to the human heart by which we live, 
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears, 
To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." 

There is certainly a kinship between these two 
poems. " Ocle to Immortality " is a great philo- 
sophic structure reared on u We are «odetoim- 

Seven." It embodies the child's feel- ^J^" 

and "We are 

ing in " "We are Seven " carried into the seven" 
years of philosophic thought. " We 
are Seven," however, is not alone the mere tale of 
a little cottage girl who could not fully realize the 
meaning of death : it represents as well the poet's 
contemplative contrast between the natural health 
and joy of life in the living child and the super- 
natural secret of death : 

" She had a rustic woodland air, 
And she was wildly clad : 
Her eyes were fair and very fair ; 
Her beauty made me glad." 

It is worthy of noting, while discussing this 
poem, that the poetic moment or inspirational 

5 



66 STUDIES IN POETRY 

thought of the poem is to be found in the last 
stanza, which, by the way, Wordsworth tells us 
was composed first. 

In the " Ode to Immortality " the poetic moment 
is to be found in the fifth stanza. It hints at, nay, 
embodies, the idea of the pre-natal existence of the 
soul. In " We are Seven " the child's feeling is 
horizoned by " this muddy vesture of clay " with no 
thought of the spirit, tabernacled therein. In the 
" Ode to Immortality " this feeling touches the im- 
mortal threshold of philosophic thought and gains 
for the poet a faith, a trust, a hope — 

" In the primal sympathy 

Which, having been, must ever be; 
In the soothing thoughts that spring 
Out of human suffering; 
In the faith that looks through death, 
In years that bring the philosophic mind." 

In studying the " Ode to Immortality " it would 
be well for the student to compare it, (1) as to met- 
some Great rical form, (2) as to ethical teaching, and 

SSTpS*!?" ( 3 ) as to ^ sthetic value > with the fo1 - 

Compared. lowing four great odes : Coleridge's 
" France " ; Gray's " Bard " ; Tennyson's " Death 
of Wellington " ; and Milton's " Nativity." Note 
the share which the poet as seer and singer has in 
the building up of an ode. Is Tennyson's " Death 
of Wellington " characterized by the same deep 



"ON INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY" 67 

and rich thought, sublime conception, and in- 
wrought truth as the " Ode to Immortality " ? Is 
it not largely labored, and, as Stedman says, built 
up of high-sounding lines and refrains in which 
rhetoric is substituted for imagination and richness 
of thought? Gray's "Bard" is a Pindaric ode. 
Would you designate the " Ode to Immortality " or 
Coleridge's u France " or Milton's " Nativity "as a 
Pindaric ode ? The " Bard " is considered to be a 
prophetic poem. Does this account for the obscur- 
ity which characterizes it? Note the manner in 
which each ode opens. Compare the five odes as 
to strength, uplift, loftiness of cast, organic mould, 
stanza, and rhyme-scheme. " The ode is a grand 
conception expressed in language of uniform dig- 
nity and often of great beauty." How far and 
how fully do the five odes embody this definition ? 
Wherein do the opening and closing of Coleridge's 
" Ode to France " resemble the opening and closing 
of the "Ode to Immortality " ? How far does each 
ode represent the special poetic characteristics of 
its author? 

The " Ode to Immortality " is essentially a philo- 
sophical poem. It never, however, descends to the 
plane of mere argument, but keeps ever The Ethical 
on the high ground of the essential ^f^eto 
identity of our childish instincts and immortality. " 
our enlightened reason. The whole poem and its 



68 STUDIES IN POETRY 

meaning and intent may be summed up as follows : 
There is set before us in the first part of the poem 
an experience common to humanity. Then it is 
shown how the soul, step by step, becoming cen- 
tred in the seen and the temporal, loses sight of 
the glory and beauty which were the dower of 
childhood. The ethical value of the poem is to be 
found in the closing stanzas, which set forth the 
fact that if we would regain the spiritual vision 
lost to us as our souls have travelled inland in life, 
far from "that immortal sea," we must become 
again as little children in this life of the soul, 
blending the early intuitions of our childhood with 
the mature reason of our manhood. The " Ode to 
Immortality " is generally regarded as Platonic in 
its philosophy, assigning as it does to mankind a 
life previous to their human one. There is, how- 
ever, a difference in the teaching of the two: 
"With Wordsworth the infant, with Plato the 
philosopher approaches nearest to the previous 
more glorious state." It should be remembered 
too, that Wordsworth held to the teachings in 
this great poem with a poetic, not a religious faith. 

QUESTIONS. 

1. Why is Wordsworth's ode "On the Intimations of 
Immortality" claimed to be the most organic poem in 
English literature? 



"ON INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY" 69 

2. What does the " Ode to Immortality " represent ? 

3. What was the origin of this poem ? 

4. What is its import ? 

5. What is its informing idea ? 

6. Explain its literary structure. 

7. Explain the three divisions of the poem. 

8. What is the thought in the first division 1 

9. What is the thought in the second division ? 

10. What is the thought in the third division ? 

11. Explain the kinship between the " Ode to Immor- 
tality " and " We are Seven." 

12. Compare the "Ode to Immortality" with other 
great odes in English literature. 

13. What is the ethical teaching of the " Ode to 
Immortality " 1.' 



COLERIDGE'S "ANCIENT MARINER." 

A new gospel of poetry received proclamation 
at the close of the eighteenth century through the 
A New Gospel ^P s °f Wordsworth and Coleridge, who 
of Poetry. j ec j ^ e h ear t f man back in pilgrimage 

to the shrine of nature, whose altar lamp had 
burned unheeded during the reign of the " correct 
school of poets." Burns and Goldsmith and Cow- 
per and Thomson prepared the way. The new 
movement, which had contemporaneous cradling 
in Germany and France, and had touched and 
quickened the literary mind .and spirit of England, 
found fullest and clearest expression in the ardent 
and reverent hearts of William Wordsworth and 
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. These gifted twain 
well represent the school of nature and romance in 
English poetry. They came with a message, a 
new gospel, to the literary world ; and despite the 
lashes and stripes, the scorn and contempt of crit- 
ics, this message, this gospel, they proclaimed to 
the literary sons of men. 

A close, intimate, and abiding friendship sprang 
up between those two gifted minds, perhaps owing 







£6^ 



"ANCIENT MARINER" 71 

to the kinship of their genius. Coleridge first 
became acquainted with Wordsworth Wordsworth 
in 1794, and the two became neigh- and Coleridge, 
bors in 1797. They formed just estimates of each 
other's powers and soon resolved to unite in a 
literary venture. They projected the " Lyrical 
Ballads," — a work which was destined to mark a 
momentous epoch in the history of English poetry. 
The purpose of the " Lyrical Ballads " was to illus- 
trate "the two cardinal points of poetry: the 
power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a 
faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the 
power of giving the interest of novelty by the 
modifying colors of the imagination." It was 
agreed that Wordsworth was to contribute poems 
on subjects chosen from e very-day life, while on 
Coleridge's part " the incidents and agents were to 
be, in part at least, supernatural, and the interest 
aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the 
affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions 
as would naturally accompany such situations, sup- 
posing them real." He was " to transfer from our 
inward nature a human interest and a semblance of 
truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of the 
imagination that willing suspension of disbelief 
which constitutes poetic faith." Coleridge's part 
of the joint volume, which appeared in 1798, vir- 
tually consisted of the " Ancient Mariner " alone. 



72 STUDIES IN POETRY 

What was the purpose of Coleridge in writing the 
" Ancient Mariner " ? Is the poem probable, and has 
Purpose and it a moral ? These are important ques- 
ts 1 " Ancient tions, and should receive the attention of 
Mariner." ^he student. Coleridge places as an in- 
troduction to his poem the following lines from 
Burnet, and they may lend some light to the pur- 
pose which the author had in building up this re- 
markable poem : " I have no difficulty in believing 
that there are more invisible than visible beings in 
the world. But who shall tell us the story of their 
whole family, and the rank, relationship, character- 
istics, and duties of each ? How they act ? Where 
they dwell ? The mind of man has always striven 
for, but never attained, a knowledge of these 
things. Meanwhile I shall not deny that some- 
times it is useful to view in a mental picture the 
image of a greater and better world, so that 
the intellect may not, through occupation with the 
petty concerns of daily life, become too narrow 
and be wholly absorbed in the consideration of 
trifles. But, nevertheless, we must watch over the 
truth and keep ourselves within bounds, in order to 
distinguish the certain from the doubtful, and day 
from night." 

It seems quite clear, we think, that Coleridge's 
purpose in writing the " Ancient Mariner," which 
is, as Swinburne says, a very triumph of modern 



"ANCIENT MARINER" 73 

poetry, was to show that God's love animates and 
binds together the whole world — 

" For so the whole round earth is every way 
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God." 

— that every creature is a link in His love, and 
that he who wantonly destroys one of God's 
creatures cuts himself off from God's love. By 
the killing of the albatross the soul of the ancient 
mariner has been wrenched from the animating 
principle that linked it to the universe. 

In Coleridge's " Table Talk" we find the following 
reference to the moral import of this poem : " Mrs. 
Barbauld once told me that she admired its Ethical 
the 'Ancient Mariner' very much, but TeacMn g- 
that there were two faults in it, — it was improba- 
ble, and had no moral. As for the probability, I 
owned that it might admit some question ; but as 
to the want of a moral, I told her that in my judg- 
ment the poem had too much ; and that the only 
or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion 
of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as 
a principle or cause of action in a work of such 
pure imagination." Of course the moral is obvi- 
ously contained in the third last stanza of the 
poem : 

" He prayeth best who loveth best 

All things both great and small ; 

For the dear God who loveth us 

He made and loveth all." 



74 STUDIES IN POETRY 

The " Ancient Mariner " is an expression of 
divine love manifested through objects of nature. 

Coleridge did much to restore the note of super- 
naturalism to English poetry. It is an element 
Supernatural- which belongs especially to mediaeval 

ism in the T b . r J _ 

Poem. poets. Later m our century Dante 

Gabriel Rossetti introduced it, together with the 
temper of religious wonder. It was one of the 
outcomes of the romantic movement in English 
poetry, which Percy's " Reliques " did so much to 
foster. Scott employs it with good effect. In the 
preparation of the " Lyrical Ballads," Coleridge 
undertook the special romance of the work, and the 
blending of supernatural machinery with human 
interest. Hence the very life and atmosphere of the 
" Ancient Mariner " have root in the supernatural, 
— in fact, it is this which holds the poem together 
and gives it artistic unity as well as imaginative 
reach and scope. 

Mrs. Oliphant contributes the following brief 
study or appreciation of the u Ancient Mariner." It 
a Brief study may shed some light upon the student's 

of the "Ancient ,\ , , ° , ,, 

Mariner." path and make more clear the purpose, 
plan, and meaning of this very unique poem : " The 
life of every day is going on gayly ; the wedding 
guests are close to the festal doors, when Mystery 
and Wonder suddenly interpose in the way, shut- 
ting out everything else around. The sounds of 



"ANCIENT MARINER" 75 

the other existence are heard through them ; and 
even by glimpses that life is visible, — the merry 
minstrels 'nodding their heads,' the bride in her 
blushes, — but the unwilling listener has entered 
into the shadow, and the unseen has got hold of 
him. It is a parable not only of the ship and the 
albatross (which is hard of interpretation) but of 
mankind, a stranger upon earth ' moving about in 
worlds not realized,' always subject to be seized 
by powers to which he is of kin, though he under- 
stands them not. ; There is more of the invisible 
than the visible in the world ' is the poet's motto, 
and with a great splendor and force of imagination 
he enforces his text. ' There was a ship,' quoth 
he, and the weird vessel glides before the unwill- 
ing listener's eyes so that he can see nothing else. 
It comes between him and the feast, between him 
and the figures of his friends, which flit like ghosts 
out of the door. Which is the real, and which is 
the vision ? The mind grows giddy and is unable 
to judge ; and while everything tangible disappears, 
the unseen sweeps triumphantly in and holds pos- 
session more real, more true, more unquestionable 
than anything that eye can see. 

" Throughout the poem this sentiment of isola- 
tion is preserved with a magical and most impres- 
sive reality. All the action is absolutely shut up 
within the doomed ship. The one man who is the 



76 STUDIES IN POETRY 

chronicler, and to whose fate everything refers, is 
never withdrawn from our attention for a moment. 
We grow silent with him, 'with throats unslaked, 
with black lips baked,' in a sympathy which is 
the very climax of poetic pain. And then what 
touches of tenderness are those which surprise us 
in the numbness and trance of awful solitude — 

1 O happy living things ! ' — 

or this other which comes after the horror of the 
reanimated bodies, the ghastly crew of the dead- 
alive — 

' For when it dawned . . . ' 

When the tale has reached its height of mystery 
and emotion a change ensues. Gradually the 
great spell is removed. As the voyage approaches 
its conclusion ordinary instrumentalities appear 
once more. 

66 This unexpected gentle conclusion brings our 
feet back to the common soil with a bewildered 
sweetness of relief and soft quiet after the prodi- 
gious strain of mental excitement, which is* nothing 
like anything else we can remember in poetry. 
The effect is one rarely produced, and which few 
poets have the strength and daring to accomplish ; 
sinking from the highest notes of spiritual music 
to the absolute simplicity of exhausted nature." 

The M Ancient Mariner " is an allegory, and repre- 



" ANCIENT MARINER " 77 

sents the emancipation of the human soul, through 
universal love, from the bonds of error its Artistic 
and passion. It is a poem of great Devices. 
spiritual significance, but its ethical value, bound 
up mystically in its lines, is not its only worth. 
This taiily organic poem should be studied through 
the artistic devices which the poet makes use of in 
the fashioning and upbuilding of the poem. 

For instance, in order to produce the impressions 
of extreme suffering and terror, Coleridge resorted 
to certain devices. First, he laid the scene of his 
tale at sea — i% in a field of life which is nearest the 
primitive forces of nature. Again, the bare inci- 
dents of his tale, stripped of their vitality, are in 
themselves productive of horror and dread : the 
notions of agonized thirst, of stagnation under 
tropical heat, of confinement to a ship manned by 
the dead, and of utter loneliness under their wide- 
open, eternally accusing eyes." Perhaps the great 
artistic device employed by Coleridge is that of 
contrast, — contrast in color, sound, motion, and the 
larger narrative effects. This artistic device of 
contrast will be found in each of the seven sec- 
tions of the poem. 

There is a goodly mixture of archaic words in the 
M Ancient Mariner." These color the atmosphere 
of the poem and help to give it fit set- a word about 
ting. In the picturesque power of ltsDlcti011 * 



78 STUDIES IN POETRY 

language, Coleridge excels. There is scarce any- 
thing in modern poetry to surpass in vividness and 
melody some portions of the " Ancient Mariner" 
and « Christabel." The words are full of song and 
sheen and color. They are more than a garment of 
the poetic thought — they throb and glow with the 
spirit itself. 

In Part Second the stanzas descriptive of the 
some entrance of the ship into the Pacific 

Beauty and Ocean, and the becalming which ensued, 
splendor. ar e very fine : 

" The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, 
The furrow followed free : 
We were the first that ever burst 
Into that silent sea. 

" Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down, 
'T was sad as sad could be ; 
And we did speak only to break 
The silence of the sea ! 

" All in a hot and copper sky 
The bloody sun, at noon, 
Eight up above the mast did stand, 
No bigger than the moon. 

" Day after day, day after day, 

We stuck — nor breath, nor motion ; 
As idle as a painted ship 
Upon a painted ocean." 



"ANCIENT MARINER" 79 

Where again can be found sweeter poetic music 
than the following ? — 

" It ceased ; yet still the sails made on 
A pleasant noise till noon, 
A noise like of a hidden brook 
In the leafy month of June, 
That to the sleeping woods all night 
Singeth a quiet tune." 

Charles Algernon Swinburne is a supreme artist 
in technique, though lacking in the fuller endow- 
ment of poetic thought. His estimate An Estimate 

of the " Ancient Mariner" is of value. oftne 
tt r™ -1 i "Ancient 

Here it is : " This poem is beyond Mariner." 

question one of the great triumphs of poetry. 

For the execution, I presume no human eye is 

too dull to see how perfect it is and how high 

in kind of perfection. Here is not the speckless 

and elaborate finish which shows everywhere the 

fresh rasp of file or chisel on its smooth and spruce 

excellence ; this is faultless after the fashion of a 

flower or tree." 

QUESTIONS. 

1. What is meant by the new gospel of poetry pro- 
claimed by Wordsworth and Coleridge ? 

2. How were the writings of these two poets received 
by the critics ? 

3. What were the relations between Wordsworth and 
Coleridge % 



80 STUDIES IN POETRY 

4. In what literary -venture did they unite 1 

5. What was the purpose of the " Lyrical Ballads "? 

6. What was the character of the poems contributed 
by each of these two poets to the " Lyrical Ballads " ? 

7. What is the purpose and scope of the " Ancient 
Mariner " ? 

8. What is the ethical teaching of this poem 1 

9. How is the supernatural element manifested in the 
" Ancient Mariner " J 

10. What is Mrs. Oliphant's appreciation of the 
* Ancient Mariner"? 

11. Illustrate the artistic devices of the poem. 

12. What may be said of the diction of this poem ? 

13. Quote a passage descriptive of the beauty and 
splendor of the poem. 

14. What is Swinburne's estimate of the "Ancient 
Mariner " 1 



SHELLEY'S "PROMETHEUS UNBOUND." 

To understand Shelley's work, it is necessary to 
understand the poet's creed. Shelley was a demo- 
crat and a communist. "Prometheus sheiiey's 
Unbound " is the supreme expression in Cree ^- 
imaginative form of that new democracy which 
found dynamic power in the Revolution of 
1789. 

Shelley held that the universe is penetrated, 
vitalized, by a spirit, and this spirit he sometimes 
designates as Nature, and again as something 
more than Life and Nature — as Love and Beauty. 
He believed that the true object of man was to 
adore this spirit, — to clasp it affectionately. We 
see this idea set forth in " Prometheus Unbound," 
for, according to Shelley, the final union of Pro- 
* metheus with Asia is the consummation of human 
destinies. 

Shelley pierced through things to their spiritual 
essence. He cared more for the world beyond 
than for the actual world around him. " I 
seek," he says, "in what I see, the manifestation 



82 STUDIES IN POETRY 

of something beyond the present and tangible 
object." 

In his religious belief Shelley was an atheist. 
Antagonism to belief in a personal God is, accord- 
ing to William Rossetti, the chief informing pur- 
pose of the " Prometheus Unbound." The poem 
breathes hatred to historical Christianity. Yet 
this great lyrical drama should be carefully studied, 
not because of its ethical value, but as an exemplar 
of the logical product of the rationalism which was 
nurtured through two centuries in the garden of 
English song. 

It is a noteworthy fact that the farther the 
human mind departs from Catholic truth the less 
The Logical w ^ ^e *^e va l ue °^ the expression of 
Product of its genius in art. The "Divina Corn- 
media" of Dante, representing the ages of 
faith, and the " Prometheus Unbound " of Shelley, 
representing the age of the Revolution, indicate 
pretty clearly the attitude of those two periods 
towards spiritual truth. There is no doubting which 
is the greater period or which the greater poem. 

To Shelley there is no moral evil — no sin. He 
does not teach self-conquest, but rebellion against 
authority. It is true he would liberate humanity, 
but he offers us no help towards this liberation 
save the discipline of sorrow and doubt, — " the 
unlimited extension of limited conditions, and our 



"PROMETHEUS UNBOUND" 83 

souls weary of the thought ; whereas the poet of 
the ' Paradiso ' promises us the knowledge of the 
Most High." 

Dante represents a fulness of faith. Shelley 
represents the absence of all faith. The poets of 
the Revolution closed with their age and demanded 
freedom as an innate right. Dante promises us 
freedom through obedience, which, indeed, is the 
only true freedom. 

"Prometheus Unbound" has its root in the 

Greek iEschylean myth. Like the " Divine 

Comedy" of Dante, Prometheus deals TheColl . 

with spiritual forces, with the eternal caption of 

n« 7 p i t . "Prometheus 

conflict oi good and evil ; the action to unbound." 

be wrought out is in both the final redemption of 

the soul of man. 

" In ; Prometheus,' " says John Addington Sy- 

monds, " Shelley conceived a colossal work of art, 

and sketched out the main figures on a scale of 

surpassing magnificence. While painting in these 

figures he seems to reduce their proportions too 

much to the level of earthly life. He quits his 

god-creating, heaven-compelling throne of myth- 

opoeic inspiration and descends to a love story of 

Asia and Prometheus. In other words, he does not 

sustain the visionary and primeval dignity of these 

incarnated abstractions ; nor, on the other hand, has 

he so elaborated their characters in detail as to 



84 STUDIES IN POETRY 

give them the substantiality of persons. There is 
therefore, something vague and hollow in both 
figures. Yet in the subordinate passages of the 
poem the true mythopceic faculty — the faculty of 
finding concrete forms for thought and of in- 
vesting emotion with personality — shines forth 
with extraordinary force and clearness. We feel 
ourselves in the grasp of a primitive myth-maker 
while we read the description of Oceanus and the 
raptures of the Earth and Moon." 

English genius tends to express itself through 
forms of experience and fact. An exception to 
Its this is, however, found in the work of 

idealism. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, and 
Shelley. They are ideal, and the idealism which 
pervades such poems as the " Ancient Mariner " and 
" Hyperion " finds its fullest manifestation in the 
" Prometheus Unbound," which is the supreme 
achievement of Shelley. 

In the creation of Prometheus Shelley has 
eliminated the taints which stain Milton's Satan 
and the Greek Prometheus. He has given us an 
ideal Prometheus, possessing all the qualities which 
go to make a perfect life. " Prometheus is, as it 
were," says the poet himself, "the type of the 
highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature 
impelled by the purest and the truest motives to 
the best and noblest ends." 



"PROMETHEUS UNBOUND" 85 

The dawn of the nineteenth century saw the 

rise of democracy. France expressed The 

this democracy in brief historic act, Democratic 

. . . . Idea in 

while it was the work 01 England to "Prometheus 

express it in eternal art. unbound." 

Shelley voices this democracy in clearest tones 
in " Prometheus Unbound." Yet this democracy of 
Shelley cannot hope to govern, for it knows 
neither obedience nor authority, and without these 
democracy is an untamed beast. Shelley recognized 
fully the law of love. " Unterrified by the grim 
realities of pain and crime revealed in nature and 
society, he held fast to the belief that if we could 
but pierce to the core of things, if we could but be 
what we might be, the world and man would both 
attain to their perfection in eternal love." Shelley, 
like many of his poetic brethren, taught the rights 
of man, but forgot his correlative duties. 

A genuine liking for " Prometheus Unbound," 
saj^s a well known critic, may be reckoned the touch- 
stone of a man's capacity for under- The Lyrical 
standing lyric poetry. Scattered ?^^ us 
throughout the drama are lyrics which unbound." 
are very miracles of workmanship — charged with 
an ethereal music which belong rather to the 
spheres of heaven than the spheres of earth. The 
spirit voice in the air which sings the hymn of 
Asia, at the moment of her apotheosis, voices alike 



86 STUDIES IN POETRY 

the highest expression of Shelley's lyrical genius 
and faith : 

" Life of Life ! Thy lips enkindle 
With their love the breath between them ; 
And thy smiles before they dwindle 
Make the cold air fire ; then screen them 
In those looks where whoso gazes 
Faints, entangled in their mazes. 

" Child of Light ! Thy limbs are burning 
Through the vest which seems to hide them, 
As the radiant lines of morning 
Through the clouds, ere they divide them ; 
And this atmosphere divinest 
Shrouds thee wheresoe'er thou shinest. 

" Fair are others ; none beholds thee. 
But thy voice sounds low and tender, 
Like the fairest, for it folds thee 
From the sight, that liquid splendour, 
And all feel, yet see thee never, 
As I feel now lost forever. 

" Lamp of Earth ! where'er thou movest 
Its dim shapes are clad with brightness, 
And the souls of whom thou lovest 
Walk upon the wings with lightness, 
Till they fail as I am failing, 
Dizzy, lost, yet unbe wailing." 

The "Divina Commedia" of Dante reflects as in a 
crystal sphere the ages of faith, Shelley's " Prome- 



"PROMETHEUS UNBOUND" 87 

theus Unbound" the age of the Revolution. Loth 
are symbolic. One was written in _ „._ . 

J The " Divina 

1320, the other in 1819. The "Divina Commedia"and 

r* t 5? j. j.- £ "Prometheus 

Uommedia represents a time oi re- unbound": a 
ligious contemplation, " Prometheus " a contrast, 
time of revolution. With Dante the great pur- 
pose, the great problem, is the purification of 
the soul ; with Shelley, the liberation of the soul. 
The central idea in Dante is obedience ; the cen- 
tral idea in Shelley is freedom. The hero of the 
" Divina Commedia " is Dante the mystic, the hero 
of " Prometheus Unbound," Prometheus the rebel. 
Both poems tell the same story — the story of a 
human soul that moves from passion to peace. 
The characters of the two protagonists in these 
poems are thus contrasted by an eminent literary 
critic : 

" Prometheus is lofty of spirit, forgiving towards 
enemies, untouched by sin, nobly firm in the re- 
jection of evil or compromise, patient through 
suffering, rilled with compassion and with univer- 
sal love. All these traits are shown to us in verse 
of sweetest harmonies. To what result ? We 
place beside Shelley's faultless Titan the ashen 
Florentine, with tight-set lip and the sign of sin 
on his forehead, and straightway human life be- 
comes a holier thing. For the greatness of the 
human soul is to be measured less by the qualities 



88 STUDIES IN POETRY 

it possesses than by the resistance it has overcome. 
The majesty of Prometheus springs from his re- 
sistance of tyranny without ; but having no foes 
to fight within he suggests vacuity. Dante has 
sinned, therefore he is lower than Prometheus ; he 
feels penitence, and therefore he is higher. He 
knows experiences into which the elemental Titan 
of Shelley cannot enter, — the rapture of pardon, 
the blessing of humility, the might of worship. 

" Into the mediaeval protagonist has passed the 
passion of generations ; into the hero of the modern 
poet have passed the theories of his author. The 
scope of emotion is vastly greater in the older 
poem. Prometheus cannot hate ; Dante is su- 
preme as a hater. If the modern attitude seem 
the higher we must remember that the charity of 
Prometheus finds its source in his fatalism. To 
Shelley the sense of moral responsibility is a 
shadow; Dante passes with silent scorn souls 
that have chosen evil for their god." 

Professor Trent, of the University of the South, is 
a clear, thoughtful, and, generally speaking, sound 

critic. It is evident from the folio w- 
An Estimate of . . 

the"Prome- nig estimate that he is not borne away 
theus unbound.' ^ ^ e p ra ise lavished at times on this 
representative and epochal poem of Shelley's. Re- 
ferring to the " Prometheus Unbound " and the 
extravagant claims put forth for it, Professor 
Trent says: 



"PROMETHEUS UNBOUND " 89 

" With regard to what maybe called the intellec- 
tual claims put forth for this poem, which has been 
edited for schools and been made the subject of 
essays by the dozen, I can say only that, however 
true they may be when applied to special passages, 
they are by no means true when applied to the 
drama as a whole. The fourth act which is a 
favorite with the Shelleyans, seems to have been 
an afterthought and is a most lame and impotent 
conclusion. Tile characters are, except for short 
intervals, vague, misty, and devoid of personality. 
The solution proposed for the problem of human 
destiny, for the freeing of the Promethean spirit of 
man, is as impossible and ineffectual as if it had 
been generated in the heated brain of a maniac. 
This great poem is really little more than a series 
of wonderful phantasmagoria flashed forth upon 
the curtain of the reader's mind by a very unsteady 
hand. When the reader voluntarily shuts off the 
light, i. e. ceases to think or judge, the effect is 
dazzling; when he allows the light of reason to 
play upon his mind the effect is just the reverse. 
I admire the ' Prometheus Unbound ' as the dar- 
ing and, in parts, splendid achievement of a bril- 
liant, unbalanced, but nobly poetic nature ; but T 
cannot admit that it is worthy of language which 
would be hyperbolical in the case of any other 
poet than Shakespeare or Milton." 



90 STUDIES IN POETRY 



QUESTIONS. 

1. What is necessary in order to understand Shelley's 
work ? 

2. Of what is " Prometheus Unbound " the supreme 
expression ? 

3. Describe Shelley's creed. 

4. What, according to William Rossetti, is the chief 
informing purpose of the " Prometheus Unbound " 1 

5. Why should this great lyrical drama be carefully 
studied 1 

6. Compare the " Prometheus Unbound " and the 
" Divina Commedia " as representing Rationalism and 
Catholicism. 

7. Explain the conception of the " Prometheus Un- 
bound." How does it compare with the "Divina Com- 
media" in its conception] 

8. Give briefly John Addington Symonds' appreciation 
of the poem. 

9. What is the tendency of English poetic genius? 

10. Name some exceptions to this tendency. Where 
does idealism find its fullest manifestation ? 

11. How is the ideal impersonation of Prometheus 
described by Shelley ? 

12. How was democracy expressed in England and 
France at the dawn of the nineteenth century ] 

13. Why cannot the democracy of Shelley as expressed 
in the " Prometheus Unbound" hope to govern ? 

14. How would Shelley have the world and man attain 
to their perfection ? 



" PROMETHEUS UNBOUND" 91 

15. What is the lyrical character of " Prometheus 
Unbound"? 

16. Contrast briefly the "Divina Commedia" and 
" Prometheus Unbound." 

17. Justify Professor Trent's estimate of the "Prome- 
theus Unbound." 



KEATS'S "EVE OF ST. AGNES." 

About the literary fame of no other English 
poet has the strife of critics been so intensely and 
bitterly waged as that of poor John 
the Genius of Keats, — from the brutal assaults of 
. " Blackwood's Magazine " and the 
" Quarterly Review " to the kindly words of Sir 
James Mackintosh, indignant at the cruel and 
savage attacks made upon our young, sensitive 
poet, and the letter of admiration by Lord Jeffrey, 
wherein he wrote, "I never regretted anything 
more than to have been too late with my testimony 
to his merits." Indeed the name of John Keats 
continued to be for some time a very storm centre 
— now dark with the clouds of bitterness and 
wrath, now brightened by the rays of just appre- 
ciation and praise. 

The voices of Keats's contemporaries were so 
loud in the academic groves of English song, 
that Keats remained for the time unheard, un- 
heeded. In the year of Keats's birth, 1795, Words- 
worth was twenty-five, Coleridge twenty-three, 
Southey twenty-one, Landor twenty, and Scott 




John Keats. 



"EVE OF ST. AGNES 93 

twenty-four. Byron and Shelley, of volcanic 
and ethereal fame, were at the time too young 
for even poetic dreams,, while Leigh Hunt, who 
was destined to be in future years Keats's warm 
and constant friend, had just reached his eleventh 
year. 

It was, however, fortunate for Keats that he 
had fallen upon such a period, when, as Dr. Hamil- 
ton Mabie says, "the intellectual and spiritual 
tides were rising, and English literature was recall- 
ing, in the breadth and splendour of its movement, 
the great Elizabethan age." It was enough that 
Keats responded to his time, and his genius took 
birth from what Matthew Arnold rightly considers 
to be the powers that concur in the creation of a 
master-work of literature : " the power of the man 
and the power of the moment." 

The very essence of Keats's poetic creed is to be 
found in his lines : 

" Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all 
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." 

His poetic vision pierced the soul of things. It 
w T as not merely surface beauty which concerned 
him, it was that beauty which is the reflection of 
the very soul of things. " When I wrote it," he 
said of one of his poems, " it was a regular step- 
ping of the imagination toward a truth." In 



94 STUDIES IN POETRY 

another place our young poet writes: "Scenery 
is fine, but human nature is finer. The sward is 
richer for the tread of a real nervous English foot ; 
the eagle's nest is finer for the mountaineer having 
looked into it." 

Keats's imagination was fed and fashioned by his 
early reading. He dipped into old classical myth- 
ology, finding room for his fancy in the 
Preparation & J ' ° J 

for Poetic pages of " Tooke's Pantheon," " Spence's 
work. Polymetis," and "Lempriere's Diction- 

ary." It was Charles Cowden Clarke who first 
introduced him to the glowing pages of Spenser. 
Together they read the " Epithalamium," and Keats 
borrowed from his friend the "Faerie Queene," 
" ramping," as Clarke writes, " through the scenes of 
the romance like a young horse turned into a spring 
meadow." The most poetic of poets became to his 
young heart a passionate delight. He revelled in 
the color and imagery of Spenser's great allegory, 
catching up with the wings of his spirit the mysti- 
cal beauty and splendor of its enchanted lines. 
" He hoisted himself up," says Clarke, " and looked 
burly and dominant as he said, ' What an image 
that is — sea-shouldering whales ! ' ' It was the full 
birth of poetry in his mind. The boy had suddenly 
become a poet. 

Such is the influence of genius upon genius ; yet, 
as a critic remarks, the genius of Keats was too 



"EVE OF ST. AGNES " 95 

virile and original to be dominated or held as debtor 
by even a master of song. There is no doubt that 
Keats ^wes much to Spenser. His first poem, u Imi- 
tation of Spenser,'* testifies to this. Surely there 
could be nothing more Spenserian in mould, spirit, 
and color than the following lines which form the 
opening stanza of this poem : 

" Now morning from her orient chamber came, 
And her first footsteps touched a verdant hill : 
Crowning its lawny crest with amber flame, 
Silvering the untainted gushes of its rill ; 
Which, pure from mossy beds, did dawn distil, 
And after parting beds of simple flowers, 
By many streams a little lake did fill, 
Which round its marge reflected woven bowers, 
And in its middle space, a sky that never lowers. ,, 

During the winter of 1819 Keats produced a 
noble group of poems — "Hyperion," " Ode on a 
Grecian Urn," " Ode to Psyche," " Ode a Group of 
to a Nightingale," and " The Eve of St. Poems - 
Agnes." 

"Endymion" had already reached the public, 
and the reviews had accorded it a most ungracious 
welcome. The opinion has gained credence, some- 
what widely too, that the reviewers killed Keats, 
and that there was some truth in Byron's jingling 
rhyme referring to our modern young Greek as 
"that fiery particle snuffed out by a magazine 



96 STUDIES IN POETRY 

article." Such a tradition has done too much 
honor to the whole brood of brutal reviewers, 
whose crime was not murder, but vulgarity and 
stupidity. Keats j>ossessed too sound a nature, 
too great a mind, to be killed by adverse criticism. 
No doubt he felt the meanness of the attacks made 
upon him. Referring to these he writes : 

" Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on 
the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes 
him a severe critic of his own work. . . . The Genius 
of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a 
man. It cannot be matured by law and precept, 
but by sensation and watchfulness in itself. That 
which is creative must create itself. In 'En- 
dymion ' I leapt headlong into the sea, and thereby 
have become better acquainted with the soundings, 
the quicksands, and the rocks than if I had stayed 
upon the shore and piped a silly pipe and taken tea 
and comfortable advice. I was never afraid of fail- 
ure ; for I would sooner fail than not be among the 
greatest." 

"I have loved the principle of beauty in all 
things," said the author of " Hyperion," during 
"Eve of st. the closing days of his life. In this 
Agnes." our young poet was certainly a modern 

Greek. But while he had the temperament of 
the Greek in his delight in beauty and his repose 
in it, his manner was, as Dr. Hamilton Mabie 



"EVE OF ST. AGNES" 97 

points out, pre-eminently romantic. Take for in- 
stance " The Eve of St. Agnes." In form and 
idea the poem belongs to the romantic. It is full 
of color and warmth and fragrance. Speaking of 
this exquisite poem. Dr. Mabie says : " There is no 
magic of colour in written speech that is not mixed 
in the diction of ' The Eve of St. Agnes,' — a 
vision of beauty deep, rich, and glowing as one 
of those dyed windows in which the heart of the 
Middle Ages still burns." 

It is interesting to note how differently Keats 
and Tennyson treat the same poetic theme. " The 
Eve of St, Agnes " is a good exempli- TxMmat 
fication of this. Tennyson's " Eve of of the same 
St. Agnes " is more severe and classical ^e^lnd 

than is that of Keats, while there is a Tennyson 

,t -. P rr , , Contrasted, 

warmth and iragrance in Keats s poem 

entirely wanting to Tennyson's. Keats approaches 
the theme through the avenue of romance, giving 
color and glow to his lines within the radiant 
dome of his imagination. The genius of Tenny- 
son turns from the romantic to the ascetic and de- 
votional and paints a St. Agnes more in accord- 
ance with the life and spirit of the early saints, and 
martyrs. Tennyson's is the more real and Cath- 
olic, Keats's the more ideal and pagan. 

Keats was responsive to the beauty of the world 
around him. He was sensuous, but his love of the 

7 



98 STUDIES IN POETRY 

beautiful was something more than that of the sur- 
Howfar ^ ce ' Keats 's vision penetrated the soul 
"The Eve of of things, and his greatness lay in his 
Reflects" mastery of the unity of life and his 
the Genius identification of the highest beauty with 
the highest truth. 
His genius is well reflected in " The Eve of St. 
Agnes." It is, as the poet himself said, a regular 
stepping of the imagination towards a truth. " The 
Eve of St. Agnes " is not only radiant with beauty, 
it is beauty itself. Its poetic thought is flashed 
through the cloister windows of the imagination 
and is warm with the breath of incense and prayer. 
Take for instance the twenty-fourth stanza of this 
poem. Did poet ever before write lines so full of 
pomp and grace and color as the following ? — 

" A casement, high and triple -arched, there was, 
All garlanded with carven imageries 
Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass, 
And diamonded with panes of quaint device, 
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes, 
As are the tiger-moth's deep-damasked wings ; 
And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries, 
And Twilight saints, and dim emblazonings, 

Ashielded 'scutcheon Blushed with blood of queens and kings. " 

" The Eve of St. Agnes " is, indeed, a casket of 

Some Pas- gems. Perhaps there is nothing finer in 
sages of Rare ° r ' i 

Beauty. the forty-two stanzas that make up the 

entire poem than the following exquisite lines : 



" EVE OF ST. AGNES" 99 

" Soon trembling in her soft and chilly nest, 
In sort of wakeful swoon, perplexed she lay, 
Until the poppied warmth of sleep oppressed 
Her soothed limbs, and soul fatigued away, 
Flown like a thought until the morrow-day ; 
Blissfully havened both from joy and pain ; 
Clasped like a missal where swart Paynims pray ; 
Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain, 

As though a rose should shut and be a bud again." 

Again, what could be more beautiful than the 
twenty-fifth stanza ? — 

u Full on this casement shone the wintry moon, 
And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast, 
As down she knelt for Heaven's grace and boon ; 
Rose-bloom fell on her hands together prest, 
And on her silver cross soft amethyst, 
And on her hair a glory like a saint : 
She seemed a splendid angel, newly drest, 
Save wings, for heaven. Porphyro grew faint : 

She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint." 

Commenting on this passage Leigh Hunt writes : 
" The lovely and innocent creature, thus praying 
under the gorgeous painted window, completes the 
exceeding and unique beauty of this picture,— 
one that will forever stand by itself in poetry as an 
addition to the stock. It would have struck a 
glow on the face of Shakespeare himself. He 
might have put Imogen or Ophelia under such a 
shrine. How proper as well as pretty the heraldic 



l, *a 



100 STUDIES IN POETRY 

term gules, considering the occasion. Bed would 
not have been a fiftieth part so good. And with 
what elegant luxury he touches the * silver cross ' 
with ' amethyst ' and the fair woman with ' rose- 
color,' the kin to their carnation." 

There is little doubt but that Keats was pos- 
sessed of great poetic endowments. Had his 
The Place of genius fully ripened it might have 

John Keats in given him a place side by side with 
the Pantheon °, . r . __ Mj ; n n 

of English Shakespeare and Milton. As Dr. Ham- 

Poetry. ilton Mabie justly remarks: "It is 

enough that except Shakespeare no other English 

poet has found such color in our speech, has 

made it linger in the ear in phrase so rich and full. 

This magical note, heard only in the greatest 

poetry, is heard in Keats, — - the evidence alike of 

the rare quality of his genius and its depth and 

power." 



QUESTIONS. 

1. What appreciation was shown for the genius of 
Keats by his contemporaries ? 

2. What may be termed the essence of Keats's poetic 
creed ? 

3. How did Keats make his preparation for his poetic 
work ? 

4. To whom did Keats owe much for his inspiration 1 

5. What group of poems did Keats produce in 1819 ? 



"EVE OF ST. AGNES" 101 

6. How was " Endymion " received by the critics, and 
how was Keats affected 1 

7. What was the tempera meut of Keats, and in which 
poem is it best illustrated ? 

8. Compare the treatment of " The Eve of St. Agnes " 
by Keats and Tennyson. 

9. How far does "The Eve of St. Agues" reflect the 
genius of Keats ] 

10. What place has John Keats in the Pantheon of 
English poetry 1 



,y 



GRAY'S "ELEGY IN A COUNTRY 
CHURCHYARD." 

The genius of English poetry has given the 
world some very beautiful elegies. Milton's 
a word "Lycidas," the first great elegy in 

about Elegies. English poetry, is commemorative, of 
the death of the poet's young friend Thomas 
King ; Tennyson's " In Memoriam " embalms in 
immortal verse the memory of one of the most 
perfect young men that have ever lived in the 
tide of times — Arthur Hallam ; and Swinburne's 
" Ave atque Vale " and Matthew Arnold's " Thyr- 
sis " are noble tributes in elegiac verse to two 
gifted souls whom death snatched untimely from 
our planet. Nor should Shelley's sweet and sad 
lament over the death of John Keats — his be- 
loved Adonais — be denied a place amongst the 
greatest of English elegies. 

Gray was a contemplative and reflective poet, 
origin, an( ^ the s pi r ^ °f his mu se sought a 

setting, and kindred environment. The " Elegy " 
Gray's is the very embodiment and incarnation 

"Elegy." o £ evening regret. There is no doubt 



"ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD" 103 

that it was within the sacred precincts of Stoke 
Poges churchyard, while contemplating each 
" frail memorial " and deciphering the rude in- 
scriptions " spelt by th' unlettered muse," that 
Gray first conceived the idea of writing the 
" Elegy." The thoughts which flooded his mind 
as he moved noiselessly through the aisles of 
" God's Acre " as the mantle of eventide descended 
upon the cold shoulders of day, were thoughts 
common to humanity. The every-day drama of 
the poor filled the theatre of his heart. Their 
narrow kingdom knew not gold or purple, but love 
built for them her lily walls and carpeted the 
floors with blossoms of peace. 

Gray's " Elegy" is Burns' "Cotter's Saturday 
Night " amplified and transplanted to English soil. 
Surely the reader can have no difficulty in finding 
in Burns' beautiful idyll the counterpart of the 
following lines : 

"For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn, 
Or busy housewife ply her evening care ; 
No children run to lisp their sire's return, 
Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share." 

We do not believe, as some critics maintain, 
that Gray's fame rests in this poem upon his skill 
as an artist. The poet himself attributed the 
popularity of the " Elegy" to the nature of its 
subject, holding that it would have had a like 



104 STUDIES IN POETRY 

popularity had it been written in prose. The 
secret of the greatness of the " Elegy " as a poem 
resides in its subject, which touches the universal 
heart and lifts mankind to a plane of true kinship 
in death. Of course there is no doubting the 
artistic merits of the poem. 

In support of this view it may be well to quote 
here the opinion of Hales, in his introduction to 
the poem. He says : " The c Elegy ' is, perhaps, the 
most widety known poem in our language. The 
reason of this extensive popularity is, perhaps, to 
be sought in the fact that it expresses in an ex- 
quisite manner feelings and thoughts that are 
universal. In the current of ideas in the ' Elegy ' 
there is, perhaps, nothing that is rare or excep- 
tional or out of the common way. The musings 
are of the most rational and obvious character 
possible; it is difficult to conceive of any one 
musing under similar circumstances who should 
not muse so ; but they are not the less deep and 
moving on this account. The mystery of life does 
not become clearer or less solemn and awful for 
any amount of contemplation. Such inevitable, 
such everlasting questions as rise in the mind 
when one lingers in the precincts of death, can 
never lose their freshness, never cease to fascinate 
and to move. It is with such questions, that would 
have been commonplace long ages sinGe, if they 



"ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD " 105 

could ever be so, that the ; Elegy ' deals. It 
deals with them in no lofty, philosophical manner, 
but in a simple, humble, unpretentious way, always 
with the truest and broadest humanity. The poet's 
thoughts turn to the poor ; he forgets the fine 
tombs inside the church, and thinks only of the 
4 mouldering heaps ' in the churchyard. Hence 
the problem that especially suggests itself is the 
potential greatness, when they lived, of ; the rude 
forefathers' that now lie at his feet. He does not 
and cannot solve it, though he finds considerations 
to mitigate the sadness it must inspire; but he 
expresses it in all its awf ulness in the most effec- 
tive language and with the deepest feeling; and 
his expression of it has become a living part of 
our language." 

Gray's " Elegy " is unlike any other of the 
great elegies in that it is impersonal. Its subject 
touches the universal, — the life of 
man horizoned by a lowly firmament, in ingidea ^" 
which burns neither star of glory nor thePoem v 
meteor of fame. 

The informing idea in the poem is to be found 
in the stanza — 

" Let not ambition mock their useful toil, 
Their homely joys and destiny obscure ; 
Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile 
The short and simple annals of the poor." 



106 STUDIES IN POETRY 

All the rest of the poem is but an amplification 
of the thought in this stanza. Truly, Gray has 
built of the " Elegy" a monument more lasting 
than a niche in Westminster Abbey, for the thought 
so delicately and sincerely enshrined in this beauti- 
ful poem will outlive the most cunning or artistic 
touch of sculptor when embodying his dream in 
Carrara marble. By this elegy Gray becomes lau- 
reate of the poor. It is their round of toil — their 
simple annals — their narrow cells that mould, fash- 
ion, and give purpose to the " Elegy." The whole 
poem leads up to the central idea — the informing 
idea — that man is great, not by virtue of the 
magnitude of his achievements, but by virtue of the 
performance of his duties. The "rude forefathers 
of the hamlet," though denied by fortune to sway 
the rod of empire, are, nevertheless, not to be 
mocked or contemned, for within their narrow 
spheres they performed each pressing and incum- 
bent duty. If they became not real Hampdens 
or voicef ul Miltons it was because — 

"Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife 

Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray ; 
Along the cool sequester'd vale of life 

They kept the noiseless tenor of their way." 

Now, what is the peculiar charm of the "Elegy " ? 
James Russell Lowell says : " It is to be found in 



"ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD " 107 

its embodying that pensively stingless pessimism 
which comes with the first gray hair; that Its peculiar 
vague sympathy with ourselves which charm, 
is so much cheaper than sympathy with others ; 
that placid melancholy which satisfies the general 
appetite for an emotion which titillates rather than 
wounds." We think, however, that its charm, 
its peculiar charm, is a thing quite apart from this 
" stingless pessimism which comes with the first 
gray hair," and rests in the simplicity and univer- 
sality of its thought enshrined in language at 
once clear, beauteous, and harmonious. It will be 
noticed that in the " Elegy " Gray is more picto- 
rial than imaginative. Indeed there is scarcely a 
stanza in the poem that would not form an excel- 
lent subject for a painting. The opening lines 
have oft been transferred to canvas. 

How far does the " Elegy " reflect the genius of 
Gray? We think that the chief characteristics 
of Tennyson are mirrored in the "In HowFarthe 

Memoriam," the chief characteristics of " Elegy "Re- 

1 fleets the 

Wordsworth in the " Ode to Immortal- Genius of 

ity," the chief characteristics of Coleridge Gray# 
in the " Ancient Mariner." Is not the " Elegy " a 
very mirror wherein you may see reflected, not 
only the poetic geYuus of Thomas Gray, but some- 
thing also of the form and spirit of eighteenth- 
century verse. Decorum was the religion of the 



108 STUDIES IN POETRY 

eighteenth century. Gray worshipped at its shrine. 
He tells us that the style he aimed at was extreme 
conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, 
and musical, and this he assuredly reached in the 
" Elegy." He united in himself genius and dilet- 
tanteism. Poetry is said to be divine madness, 
but the English poets of the eighteenth century 
w^ere the sanest of the sane. As Lowell says, no 
English poet between 1700 and 1800 need have 
feared a writ de lunatico inquirendo. Still there 
are hints in the " Elegy" that the heart of man 
was turning for inspiration to the shrine of nature. 
A critic says that Gray never spoke out, — that his 
thought lacked spontaneity. " He was a poetical 
scholar and scholarly poet. His poetry twined it- 
self around his learning and was saturated by it. 
He planted himself in bookish soil and flowered at 
last into verse." 

Gray was a great admirer of Dryden and bor- 
rowed from him the form or mould in which the 

" Elegy " is cast. It is the iambic pen- 
Technique and 0t/ . x 

Language of tameter measure. Of course it was 
the "Elegy." nQ ^ or jgi na ;[ w ith Dryden, being first 

employed by Raleigh. It is a measure which fits 
the theme most admirably. The reader cannot 
fail to note its suitableness for- pictorial effect. 
Gray had a thorough knowledge of perspective, 
while his skill as an artist in combining words and 



" ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD" 109 

sounds gave him a complete command over the 
resources of melody. This, as a writer remarks, 
explains why he is so easy to remember : why, 
though he wrote so little, so much of what he 
wrote is familiar on men's tongues. 

It is claimed that Gray borrowed his phrases 
and language from other poets. For instance, take 
this stanza — 

" Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield, 

Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke ; 
How jocund did they drive their team afield ! 

How bow'd the woods beneath their sturdy stroke ! " 

Stubborn glebe is found in Gay, afield in Milton, 
and sturdy stroke in Spenser, But has any poet in 
his vocabulary the right of eminent domain ? Is 
not the English language the inheritance of the 
people? The gold coinage of exchange when 
minted may pass through a thousand hands — 
always remaining the property of the possessor. 

It is not just, therefore, to Gray to regard his 
"Elegy" as a mosaic made up of phrases borrowed 
from other poets ; it requires genius in itself to 
give a fit robing to thought, and certainly it must 
be conceded that the author of the " Elegy " has 
dressed his poetic offspring in purple and fine 
linen. 

Few poems have been so tampered with in the 



110 STUDIES IN POETRY 

text as the "Elegy." Editors and publishers 
A word as to have > as Thackeray would say, put their 
certain hoofs and horns through it. It will be 

men ons ' remembered that it was first published 
in book form by Dodsley,in February, 1751. Two 
manuscripts of the " Elegy " in Gray's handwriting 
still exist. One of these is known as the Pem- 
broke manuscript, which is to be found in Pem- 
broke Hall, Cambridge University, and the other 
is known as the Wrightson manuscript. As W. J. 
Rolfe, in his edition of Gray's poems, points out, 
there is little doubt that the latter is the original 
manuscript of the "Elegy." Of course, not a few 
of the emendations were made by Gray himself 
in the various editions which were published. Let 
us here note some of these : 

The fifth stanza originally read — 

" Forever sleep.: the breezy call of morn, 

Or swallow twit'ring from the straw-built shed, 
Or chanticleer so shrill or echoing horn, 

No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed." 

The fourteenth stanza read thus : 

" Some village Cato, who, with dauntless breast, 
The little tyrant of his field withstood ; 
Some. mute inglorious Tully here may rest, 
Some Caesar guiltless of his country's blood.' * 

The substitution of the names of three English- 
men for the three Romans, Cato, Tully, and Csesar, 



"ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD" 111 

indicated in Gray's time the going out of the 
classic taste, or fashion, which had first taken root 
in the period of the Renaissance. m 

After the twenty-fifth stanza came the following 
stanza which was omitted in subsequent editions : 

" Him have we seen the greenwood side along, 

While o'er the heath we hied, our labour done, 
Oft as the woodlark pip'd her farewell song, 
With wistful eyes pursue the setting sun." 

Concerning this stanza, Mason remarks : " I 
rather wonder that he rejected this stanza, as it 
not only has the same sort of Doric delicacy which 
charms us peculiarly in this part of the poem, but 
also completes the account of his whole day ; 
whereas, this evening scene being omitted, we have 
only his morning walk and his noontide repose." 

Lord Mahon, when telling of the capture of 
Quebec, in 1759, in his History of England, relates 
how General Wolfe paid a beautiful General Wolfe 
tribute to the " Elegy." It was on the ^Eiegy." 
night of September 13th, 1759 — the night pre- 
ceding the battle on the Plains of Abraham ; 
Wolfe was descending the St. Lawrence with a 
part of his troops. The historian says : " Swiftly 
but silently did the boats fall down with the tide, 
unobserved by the enemy's sentinels at their posts 
along the shores. Of the soldiers on board how 
eagerly must every heart have throbbed at the 



112 STUDIES IN POETRY 

coming conflict! How intently must every eye 
have contemplated the dark outline, as it lay pen- 
cilled upon the midnight sky, and as every mo- 
ment it grew closer and clearer, of the hostile 
heights ! Not a word was spoken — not a sound 
heard beyond the rippling of the stream. Wolfe 
alone — thus tradition has told us — repeated in a 
low tone to the other officers in his boat those 
beautiful stanzas with which a country churchyard 
inspired the muse of Gray. One noble line, — 

' The paths of glory lead but to the grave,' — 

must have seemed at such a moment fraught with 
mournful meaning. At the close of the recitation 
Wolfe added, 'Now, gentlemen, I would rather 
be the author of that poem than take Quebec' " 

The whole " Elegy " is a casket of gems, and 
difficult is the task amid such riches to select the 
some passages of rare beauty. Surely the 

Rare^eauty. following stanzas are true to the atmos- 
phere of their setting! Surely, too, their music 
and verbal lustre must touch and charm both eye 
and heart : 

" The breezy call of incense-breathing morn, 

The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed, 
The cock's shrill clarion or the echoing horn, 
No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed. 



"ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD" 113 

" The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, 
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, 
Awaits alike th' inevitable hour. 

The paths of glory lead but to the grave. 

" Full many a gem of purest ray serene 

The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear; 
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, 
And waste its sweetness on the desert air." 

The place of the " Elegy " must unquestionably 
be among the classics of English poetry. It con- 
tains but one hundred and eighteen me Place of 
lines, every line of which is quotable ^^sh 7 " 
and full of that polish and splendor Poetry, 
which only real poetic artistry can impart. To no 
other poem in the English language has the genius 
of mankind paid such homage in translation as to 
the " Elegy." Of these translations there have 
been: one in Hebrew, seven in Greek, twelve in 
Latin, thirteen in Italian, fifteen in French, six in 
German, and one in Portuguese; 

The fame of Thomas Gray is assuredly secured 
in the " Elegy " against the teeth of time. 

QUESTIONS. 

1. Name the great elegies in English poetry. 

2. What is the origin and import of Gray's "Elegy " ? 

3. To what is the greatness of Gray's " Elegy " 
attributed 1 

8 



114 STUDIES IN POETRY 

4. What is the informing idea of the poem ? 

5. What resemblance is there between the " Elegy " 
and Burns' " Cotter's Saturday Night " ? 

6. What is the peculiar charm of Gray's " Elegy " ? 

7. How far does the " Elegy" reflect the genius of 
Gray 1 

8. Explain why the " Elegy " is easy to remember. 

9. What dt)es the substitution of the three English 
names for the three Roman names — Cato, Tully, and 
Csesar — in the " Elegy," indicate 1 

10. What beautiful tribute did General Wolfe pay to 
the author of the " Elegy " ? 

11. What place does the "Elegy" hold in English 
poetry ? 

12. How has the world shown appreciation of the 
" Elegy " ? 



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